Search Results
Working Paper
Understanding stock return predictability
Over the period 1927:Q1 to 2005:Q4, the average CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) and stock market variance jointly forecast stock market returns. This result holds up quite well in a number of robustness checks, and we show that the predictive power of the average IV might come from its close relation with systematic risk omitted from CAPM. First, high lagged returns on high IV stocks predict low future returns on the market as a whole. Second, returns on a hedging portfolio that is long in stocks with low IV and short in stocks with high IV perform as well as the value premium in ...
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 ...
Journal Article
Why do stock prices react to the Fed?
Journal Article
Why are stock market returns correlated with future economic activities?
Stock price, because it is a forward-looking variable, forecasts economic activities. An unexpected increase in stock price reflects that (i) future dividend growth is higher and/or (ii) future discount rates are lower than previously anticipated; therefore, the increase predicts higher output and investment. As well, other studies argue for an important relation between the expected stock market return and investment. In this paper, Hui Guo analyzes the relative importance of these mechanisms by using Campbell and Shiller?s (1988) method to decompose stock market return into three parts: ...
Journal Article
Stock market volatility: reading the meter
Working Paper
Aggregate idiosyncratic volatility in G7 countries
The paper analyzes average idiosyncratic volatility in G7 countries. We find that idiosyncratic volatility is highly correlated across countries and there is a significant Granger causality from the U.S. to the other countries and vice versa. Consistent with U.S. data, when combined with stock market volatility, idiosyncratic volatility has significant predictive power for stock market returns and the value premium in many other G7 countries. Moreover, in U.S. data, idiosyncratic volatility has explanatory power for stock returns very similar to that of value premium volatility in both ...
Journal Article
Stock market dispersion and unemployment
Journal Article
Reading inflation expectations from CPI futures
Journal Article
A simple model of limited stock market participation
Stocks have outperformed government bonds, on average, by a large margin in historical data. However, most U.S. households do not own stocks, either directly or indirectly. Also, stocks are highly concentrated in the hands of relatively few wealthy people. In this article, Hui Guo describes some aspects of stock ownership. He then uses an overlapping-generations model to help explain why stock market participation is so limited and discusses some implications of limited stock market participation.
Working Paper
Equity market volatility and expected risk premium
This paper revisits the time-series relation between the conditional risk premium and variance of the equity market portfolio. The main innovation is that we construct a measure of the ex ante equity market risk premium using corporate bond yield spread data. This measure is forward-looking and does not rely critically on either realized equity returns or instrumental variables. We find strong support for a positive risk-return tradeoff, and this result is not sensitive to a number of robustness checks, including alternative proxies of the conditional stock variance and controls for hedging ...