Search Results
Working Paper
Limited stock market participation and asset prices in a dynamic economy
We present a consumption-based model that explains the equity premium puzzle through two channels. First, because of borrowing constraints, the shareholder cannot completely diversify his income risk and requires a sizable risk premium on stocks. Second, because of limited stock market participation, the precautionary saving demand lowers the risk-free rate but not stock return and generates a substantial liquidity premium. Our model also replicates many other salient features of the data, including the first two moments of the risk-free rate, excess stock volatility, stock return ...
Working Paper
Uncovering the risk-return relation in the stock market
There is an ongoing debate about the apparent weak or negative relation between risk (conditional variance) and expected returns in the aggregate stock market. We develop and estimate an empirical model based on the ICAPM that separately identifies the two components of expected returns?the risk component and the component due to the desire to hedge changes in investment opportunities. The estimated coefficient of relative risk aversion is positive, statistically significant, and reasonable in magnitude. However, expected returns are driven primarily by the hedge component. The omission of ...
Working Paper
Market timing with aggregate and idiosyncratic stock volatilities
Guo and Savickas [2005] show that aggregate stock market volatility and average idiosyncratic stock volatility jointly forecast stock returns. In this paper, we quantify the economic significance of their results from the perspective of a portfolio manager. That is, we evaluate the performance, e.g., the Sharpe ratio and Jensen's alpha, of a mean-variance manager who tries to time the market based on those two variables. We find that, over the period 1968-2004, the associated market-timing strategy outperforms the buy-and-hold strategy, and the difference is statistically and economically ...
Journal Article
Stock market volatility: reading the meter
Journal Article
Stock market returns, volatility, and future output
In this article, Hui Guo shows that, if stock volatility follows an AR(1) process, stock market returns relate positively to past volatility but relate negatively to contemporaneous volatility in Merton?s (1973) Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model. The model helps explain the recent finding that stock market volatility drives out returns in forecasting real gross domestic product growth because the predictive power of returns is hampered by their positive correlation with past volatility. If the positive relation between returns and past volatility is controlled for, however, the author ...
Journal Article
Stock market dispersion and unemployment
Journal Article
Are investors more risk-averse during recessions?
Working Paper
International transmission of inflation among G-7 countries: a data-determined VAR analysis
We investigate the international transmission of inflation among G-7 countries using a data-determined vector autoregression analysis, as advocated by Swanson and Granger (1997). Over the period 1973 to 2003, we find that U.S. innovations have a large effect on inflation in the other countries, although they are not always the dominant international factor. Similarly, shocks to some other countries also have a statistically and economically significant influence on U.S. inflation. Moreover, our evidence indicates that U.S. inflation has become less vulnerable to foreign shocks since the early ...
Journal Article
A rational pricing explanation for the failure of CAPM
Many authors have found that the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) does not explain stock returns?possibly because it is only a special case of Merton?s (1973) intertemporal CAPM under the assumption of constant investment opportunities (e.g., a constant expected equity premium). This paper explains the progress that has been made by dropping the assumption that expected returns are constant. First, the evidence on the predictability of returns is summarized; then, an example from Campbell (1993) is used to show how time-varying expected returns can lead to the rejection of the CAPM.
Journal Article
Oil price volatility and U.S. macroeconomic activity
Oil shocks exert influence on macroeconomic activity through various channels, many of which imply a symmetric effect. However, the effect can also be asymmetric. In particular, sharp oil price changes-either increases or decreases-may reduce aggregate output temporarily because they delay business investment by raising uncertainty or induce costly sectoral resource reallocation. Consistent with these asymmetric-effect hypotheses, the authors find that a volatility measure constructed using daily crude oil futures prices has a negative and significant effect on future gross domestic product ...