This paper examines the idiosyncratic volatility (IV) puzzle in the Indian stock market for the period 1999–2014. Univariate and bivariate sorting, as well as cross-section regressions, suggest a positive relation between idiosyncratic volatility and future stock returns. However, this...

A prominent factor used in most models predicting stock returns is firm size. Yet no consensus has emerged on the magnitude and stability of the size premium, with some researchers even questioning the usefulness of the factor. To take stock of the voluminous academic literature on the size...

We decompose total variance into its bad and good components and measure the premia associated with their fluctuations using stock and option data from a large cross-section of firms. The total variance risk premium (VRP) represents the premium paid to insure against fluctuations in bad variance...

The recent increase in passive investment products has provided investors with easy access to international markets. The basic motivation of this paper is to offer new tools to investors who want to allocate assets across countries. This study investigates the performance of equity country...

We conduct a comprehensive asset pricing analysis for the U.S. property/liability insurance industry using monthly data from 1988 to 2015. We find that state-of-the-art models such as the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model cannot explain the returns of property/liability insurance stocks...

We decompose total disagreement about macro variables into the disagreement among optimists (i.e., forecasters whose forecast exceeds a certain threshold) and pessimists. Optimistic (pessimistic) forecasters tend to disagree more in good (bad) times. Pessimistic (optimistic) disagreement...

We decompose the quadratic payoff on a stock into its loss and gain components and measure the premia associated with their fluctuations, called the loss and gain quadratic risk premium (QRP) respectively. The loss QRP interprets as the premium paid for downside risk hedging, while the gain QRP...

Medical innovation enhances labor health, promotes human capital productivity, and influences asset prices. Using a manually collected dataset on drug approvals to identify medical innovation, I first confirm its direct impact on human capital -- a higher medical innovation shock predicts a...

We show that the widely documented negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) and expected returns can be explained by the mean reversion of stocks' idiosyncratic volatilities. We use option-implied information to extract the mean reversion speed of IVOL in an almost model-free...