Implied option volatility averages about 19% per year, while the unconditional return volatility is only about 16%. The difference, coined the volatility premium, is substantial and translates into large returns for sellers of index options. This paper studies a general equilibrium model based on long-run risk which in an effort to explain the premium. In estimating the model on past data of st...

When there is uncertainty about a CEO’s quality, news about the firm causes rational investors to update their expectation of the firm’s value for two reasons: Updates occur because of the direct effect of the news, and also because news leads investors to update their assessment of the CEO’s quality, which changes expected future cash flows. As a CEO’s quality becomes known more precisely over...

Recent explanations of aggregate stock market fluctuations suggest that countercyclical stock market volatility is consistent with rational asset evaluations. In this paper, I develop a framework to study the causes of countercyclical stock market volatility. I find that countercyclical risk premia do not imply countercyclical return volatility. Instead, countercyclical stock volatility occurs ...

Economic theory suggests that the magnitude and direction of a company’s currency risk exposure depends crucially on its fundamental involvement in international trade. For US industries, we find that the stock performance of an import-oriented company moves positively with the performance of the dollar, but the stock performance of an export-oriented company tends to move against the dollar. B...

We test the hypothesis that, when thinking about allocating money to a stock, investors mentally represent the stock by the distribution of its past returns and then evaluate this distribution in the way described by prospect theory. In a simple model of asset prices in which some investors think in this way, a stock whose past return distribution has a high (low) prospect theory value earns a ...

In this paper, we provide additional empirical evidence on the impact of institutional investors on stock return dynamics. The Polish pension system reform in 1999 and the associated increase in institutional ownership due to the investment activities of pension funds are exploited as an unique institutional characteristic. Performing a variant of the event study methodology in an asymmetric GA...

Growth, History, or Institutions? What Explains State Fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa We explore the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for a wide range of economic, demographic, geographic and istitutional regressors, we find that institutions, and in particular the civil liberties index and the number of revolutions, are the main determinants of fragility, even...

The main goal of the present study is testing asymmetric risk pricing and comparing it with pricing of traditional risk measures in Tehran Stock Market. Accordingly, a sample consisting of 101 companies listed in Tehran Stock Market during 2002-2013 went under investigation. In order to test asymmetric risk pricing, regression model of panel data was applied. The results revealed a positive and...

Growth, History, or Institutions? What Explains State Fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa We explore the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for a wide range of economic, demographic, geographic and istitutional regressors, we find that institutions, and in particular the civil liberties index and the number of revolutions, are the main determinants of fragility, even...