This study examines the relationship between excess return volatility and economic policy uncertainty in U.S using monthly data for the period 1985-2011. The result reveals the existence of a long-run positive relationship between excess return volatility and economic policy uncertainty. The...

The idiosyncratic volatility anomaly, as first documented in Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006), has received considerable attention in the literature. In this paper, we examine the pervasiveness of the anomaly in various stock samples and provide evidence towards distinguishing potential...

This paper investigates how stock market returns respond to economic policy uncertainty shocks. Based on the vector autoregression (VAR) analysis of the monthly changes in economic policy uncertainty index in the United States and CRSP value-weighted index from 1985:M2 to 2012:M6, the results...

We find that the idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) puzzle exists only among firms that under-perform their benchmark or release negative earnings surprises. We explain the findings using a Bayesian updating model in which agents observe noisy signals about future cash flows. In this setting, high...

Stocks tend to earn high or low returns relative to other stocks every year in the same month (Heston and Sadka 2008). We show these seasonalities are balanced out by seasonal reversals: a stock that has a high expected return relative to other stocks in one month has a low expected return...

This paper examines the effect of income smoothing on information uncertainty, stock returns, and cost of equity. I show that income smoothing through both total accruals and discretionary accruals tends to reduce firms' information uncertainty, as measured by stock return volatility, analyst...