Default Risk and Cross Section of Returns

Inflation Risk and the Cross Section of Stock Returns

I establish that inflation risk is priced in the cross section of stock returns: Stocks that have low returns during inflationary times command a risk premium. I estimate a market price of inflation risk that is comparable in magnitude to the price of risk for the aggregate market. Inflation is therefore a key determinant of risk in the cross section of stocks. The inflation premium cannot be e...

Commodity Risk Factors and the Cross-Section of Equity Returns

The article examines whether commodity risk is priced in the cross-section of equity returns. Alongside a long-only equally-weighted portfolio of commodity futures, we employ as an alternative commodity risk factor a term structure portfolio that captures the propensity of commodity futures markets to be backwardated or contangoed. Equity-sorted portfolios with greater sensitivities to the two ...

Cash Flow, Consumption Risk and Cross Section of Stock Returns

This paper directly links the risk premium on an asset to two characteristics of its underlying cash flow: cash flow covariance with aggregate consumption; and cash flow duration, which measures the temporal pattern of the cash flow. Their impact on the cross-sectional variation of risk premia can be largely captured by a two-factor cash flow model. While cash flow covariance is of firstorder i...

Failure Risk and the Cross-Section of Hedge Fund Returns

On average, hedge funds experience slow failures rather than sudden crashes. I model a fund’s probability of failure using a dynamic logit regression and find that fund failures are predicted by even 7-month lagged information. Hedge funds fail slowly as investors withdraw their funds over a period of time because of poor performance. Also, longer share restriction periods and the presence of m...

Systematic risk and the cross-section of hedge fund returns