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...

In the empirical finance literature findings on the risk-return tradeoff in excess stock market returns are ambiguous. In this study, we develop a new QR-GARCH-M model combining a probit model for a binary business cycle indicator and a regime switching GARCH-in-mean model for excess stock market return with the business cycle indicator defining the regime. Estimation results show that there is...

According to the volatility feedback effect, an unexpected increase in squared volatility leads to an immediate decline in the price–dividend ratio. In this paper, we consider the properties of stock price dynamics and option valuations under the volatility feedback effect bymodeling the joint dynamics of stock price, dividends, and volatility in continuous time. Most importantly, our model pre...

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 ...

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 phen...

investing in stock markets usually is involved in more risks than the bounds and bank deposits. it is expected that resulting returns (capital gain plus yields) from trading in a stock market to be more than those of in a risk free investment. therefore, developing accurate techniques of estimation and forecasting in volatility analysis of financial markets is inevitable. sum squares of weekly ...

We compare systematically several classes of stochastic volatility models of stock market fluctuations. We show that the long-time return distribution is either Gaussian or develops a power-law tail, while the short-time return distribution has generically a stretched-exponential form, but can assume also an algebraic decay, in the family of models which we call “GARCH”-type. The intermediate r...

The Peso Problem Hypothesis has often been advocated in the ...nancial literature to explain the historically puzzlingly high risk premium of stock returns. Using a dynamic model of learning, this paper shows that the implications of the Peso Problem Hypothesis are much more far reaching than the ones commonly advocated, implying most of the stylized facts about stock returns. These include hig...