This paper presents asset predictability evidence from the difference between implied and expected variances or variance risk premium that: (1) the variance difference measure predicts a significant positive risk premium across equity, bond, and credit markets; (2) the predictability is short-run, in that it peaks around one to four months and dies out as the horizon increases; and (3) such a s...

This paper explores U.S. mutual fund flows, finding strong evidence of seasonal reallocation across funds based on fund exposure to risk. We show that substantial money moves from U.S. equity to U.S. money market and government bond mutual funds in the fall, then back to equity funds in the spring, controlling for the influence of past performance, advertising, liquidity needs, capital gains ov...

We analyze the risk, return and cash flow characteristics of infrastructure investments by using a unique dataset of deals done by private-equity-like investment funds. We show that infrastructure deals have a performance that is higher than that of non-infrastructure deals, despite lower default frequencies. However, we do not find that infrastructure deals offer more stable cash flows. Our pa...

We present an equilibrium model of a moral-hazard economy with one firm and financial markets, where a stock and bonds are traded. We show that it is optimal for the principal to forbid the agent to trade the stock; that the second-best interest rate is lower than the first-best interest rate; and that the second-best equity premium can be higher or lower than the first best equity premium. We ...

Our objective in this article is to study analytically the effect of borrowing constraints on asset returns in an economy where agents are heterogenous with respect to their risk aversion. We use asymptotic analysis to characterize the equilibrium in a general equilibrium exchange economy with an arbitrary number of agents who differ in their risk aversion and face limits on borrowing. We find ...

This paper implements a fair wage constraint in the fashion of Akerlof and Yellen (1990) into an analytically tractable core-periphery agglomeration model. This enables us to study the role of imperfect labour markets for the pattern of agglomeration. We illustrate that, in the short run, a marginal increase in fair wage preferences leads to an unambiguous compression of the national factor pri...

T his paper ascertains the extent of mispricing in equity portfolios, mispricing-divestment relation, and the role of African equities as risk diversification strategies during commodity market turbulence. Following Baur and Lucey (2010), one identifies an arbitrary commodity market crisis to be 1%, 5%, and 10% declining moments in returns. However, their approach is extended by usin...

We specify a class of non-linear and non-Gaussian models for which we estimate and forecast the conditional distributions with daily frequency. We use these forecasts to calculate VaR measures for three different equity markets (US, GB and Japan). These forecasts are evaluated on the basis of different statistical performance measures as well as on the basis of their economic costs that go alon...

Even though labor income represents about two thirds of disposal income to household, its role has largely been neglected by asset pricing models. In this paper, we solve a general equilibrium model which can both rationalize important feature of labor markets as well as financial markets. To this end, we embed labor market search frictions into a business cycle model where the representative h...

The recent episodes of financial turmoil in Mexico, East Asia, Russia, Brazil, and Argentina are often dubbed financial crises. However, the severe downturns in equity markets, abrupt currency devaluations, and massive capital flight that characterize these events can still be deemed compatible with efficient and functioning financial markets. Thus, why is a financial crisis a “crisis?” To answ...