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Working Paper
Winter blues and time variation in the price of risk
Previous research has documented robust links between seasonal variation in length of day, seasonal depression (known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD), risk aversion, and stock market returns. The influence of SAD on market returns, known as the SAD effect, is large. The authors study the SAD effect in the context of an equilibrium asset pricing model to determine whether the seasonality can be explained using a conditional version of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) that allows the price of risk to vary over time. Using daily and monthly data for the United States, Sweden, New ...
Working Paper
Stare down the barrel and center the crosshairs: Targeting the ex ante equity premium
The equity premium of interest in theoretical models is the extra return investors anticipate when purchasing risky stock instead of risk-free debt. Unfortunately, we do not observe this ex ante premium in the data; we only observe the returns that investors actually receive ex post, after they purchase the stock and hold it over some period of time during which random economic shocks affect prices. Over the past century U.S. stocks have returned roughly 6 percent more than risk-free debt, which is higher than warranted by standard economic theory; hence the "equity premium puzzle." In this ...
Working Paper
Rational exuberance: The fundamentals of pricing firms, from blue chip to “dot com”
The author establishes that classic firm-valuation methods based on dividends (or equivalently free cash flows or residual income) can be modified to be based on any financial variable (V), such as sales, given V is cointegrated with the fundamental value (P) of the firm. The variable V (or a fraction of V) replaces dividends in the valuation formula, through a share liquidation scheme tied to V/P. The author shows that this modified valuation formula is equivalent to the classic fundamental valuation formula based on dividends, provided the share liquidation implicit in this scheme is ...
Journal Article
Pricing firms on the basis of fundamentals
Determining the right or fair price of a stock is one of the oldest problems in finance. Business mergers and acquisitions rely on this information, but only in the last several decades have formal models been developed to address the question. This article focuses on fundamental valuation, a technique that determines the right price by forecasting cash flows from a stock market investment and calculating what that income is worth. ; The author first provides an overview of the literature and an illustration of commonly used fundamental valuation techniques based on relative valuation and the ...
Working Paper
Winter blues: a SAD stock market cycle
This paper investigates the role of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in the seasonal time-variation of stock market returns. SAD is an extensively documented medical condition whereby the shortness of the days in fall and winter leads to depression for many people. Experimental research in psychology and economics indicates that depression, in turn, causes heightened risk aversion. Building on these links between the length of day, depression, and risk aversion, we provide international evidence that stock market returns vary seasonally with the length of the day, a result we call the SAD ...
Working Paper
Volatility forecasts, trading volume, and the ARCH versus option-implied volatility trade-off
Market expectations of future return volatility play a crucial role in finance; so too does our understanding of the process by which information is incorporated in security prices through the trading process. The authors seek to learn something about both of these issues by investigating empirically the role of trading volume in predicting the relative informativeness of volatility forecasts produced by ARCH models versus the volatility forecasts derived from option prices and in improving volatility forecasts produced by ARCH and option models and combinations of models. Daily and monthly ...