The Cross-Section of Volatility and Expected Returns
نویسندگان
چکیده
We examine the pricing of aggregate volatility risk in the cross-section of stock returns. Consistent with theory, we find that stocks with high sensitivities to innovations in aggregate volatility have low average returns. Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility relative to the Fama and French (1993, Journal of Financial Economics 25, 2349) model have abysmally low average returns. This phenomenon cannot be explained by exposure to aggregate volatility risk. Size, book-to-market, momentum, and liquidity effects cannot account for either the low average returns earned by stocks with high exposure to systematic volatility risk or for the low average returns of stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility. IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT THE VOLATILITY OF STOCK RETURNS varies over time. While considerable research has examined the time-series relation between the volatility of the market and the expected return on the market (see, among others, Campbell and Hentschel (1992) and Glosten, Jagannathan, and Runkle (1993)), the question of how aggregate volatility affects the cross-section of expected stock returns has received less attention. Time-varying market volatility induces changes in the investment opportunity set by changing the expectation of future market returns, or by changing the risk-return trade-off. If the volatility of the market return is a systematic risk factor, the arbitrage pricing theory or a factor model predicts that aggregate volatility should also be priced in the cross-section of stocks. Hence, stocks with different sensitivities to innovations in aggregate volatility should have different expected returns. The first goal of this paper is to provide a systematic investigation of how the stochastic volatility of the market is priced in the cross-section of expected stock returns. We want to both determine whether the volatility of the market ∗Ang is with Columbia University and NBER. Hodrick is with Columbia University and NBER. Yuhang Xing is at Rice University. Xiaoyan Zhang is at Cornell University. We thank Joe Chen, Mike Chernov, Miguel Ferreira, Jeff Fleming, Chris Lamoureux, Jun Liu, Laurie Hodrick, Paul Hribar, Jun Pan, Matt Rhodes-Kropf, Steve Ross, David Weinbaum, and Lu Zhang for helpful discussions. We also received valuable comments from seminar participants at an NBER Asset Pricing meeting, Campbell and Company, Columbia University, Cornell University, Hong Kong University, Rice University, UCLA, and the University of Rochester. We thank Tim Bollerslev, Joe Chen, Miguel Ferreira, Kenneth French, Anna Scherbina, and Tyler Shumway for kindly providing data. We especially thank an anonymous referee and Rob Stambaugh, the editor, for helpful suggestions that greatly improved the paper. Andrew Ang and Bob Hodrick both acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation.
منابع مشابه
Value at Risk and Expected Stock Returns
This paper provides empirical evidence that firm size, liquidity, and Value-at-Risk (VaR) explain the cross-sectional variation in expected returns, while market beta and total volatility have almost no power to capture the cross-section of expected returns at the firm level. The strong positive relation between average returns and VaR turns out to be robust across different investment horizons...
متن کاملHorizon - specific macroeconomic risks and the cross section of expected returns ∗ †
We show that decomposing macroeconomic risks across horizon is key to uncover a tight link between risk premia and the real economy. Exposure in four-year returns to innovations in macroeconomic growth and volatility with a matching half-life of over four years is priced in a wide variety of test assets. Shorter-term risks are not priced. Importantly, we show that long-term growth and volatilit...
متن کاملContinuous Beta, Discontinuous Beta, and the Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns∗
Aggregate stock market returns are naturally categorized as either small or large movements. In the continuous-time model setup, we can formally identify these movements as continuous or discontinuous (jump). Using a large, novel, highfrequency dataset, I investigate how individual stocks respond to these two different market changes. I also explore whether the different systematic risks associ...
متن کاملAsset Pricing Implications of Volatility Term Structure Risk
I find that stocks with high sensitivities to changes in the V IX slope exhibit high returns on average. The price of V IX slope risk is approximately 2.5% annually, statistically significant and cannot be explained by other common factors, such as the market excess return, size, book-to-market, momentum, liquidity, market volatility, and the variance risk premium. I provide a theoretical model...
متن کاملEssays in Asset Pricing
In the first chapter ``Gold, Platinum, and Expected Stock Returns'', I show that the ratio of gold to platinum prices (GP) reveals variation in risk and proxies for an important economic state variable. GP predicts future stock returns in the time-series and explains variation in average stock returns in the cross-section. GP outperforms existing predictors and similar patterns are found in int...
متن کامل