Volatility Forecasting and Time‐varying Variance Risk Premiums in Grains Commodity Markets

In this paper we examine empirically the predictive power of model‐free option‐implied variance and skewness in wheat, maize and soybeans derivative markets. We find that option‐implied risk‐neutral variance outperforms historical variance as a predictor of future realised variance for these three commodities. In addition, we find that risk‐neutral option‐implied skewness significantly improves variance forecasting when added in the information variable set. Variance risk premia add significant predictive power when included as an additional factor for predicting future commodity returns.     

Corporate liquidity and risk management with time-inconsistent preferences

This paper extends the model of corporate liquidity and risk management with limited commitment by incorporating time-inconsistent preferences. With respect to the firm's liquidity w = W∕K, it predicts that in the presence of time-inconsistency, the entrepreneur optimally responds by lowering the maximal debt capacity, over-consuming, under-investing and reducing both the idiosyncratic and systematic volatility of w. When disentangling the entrepreneur's belief with regard to future selves' time-inconsistent behavior, as a result of sophistication effect, the sophisticated entrepreneur reduces the endogenous debt capacity, invests less, decreases consumption, engages less in financial hedging and allocates even smaller liquid assets in the market portfolio than naive entrepreneur.     

Positive IVOL-MAX effect: A study on the Singapore Stock Market

This paper demonstrates a positive and significant IVOL effect in the Singapore Stock Market meaning that the highly volatile stocks are showing better returns in the subsequent month. More explicitly, there is a strong positive relationship between stock’s idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) and its subsequent month’s return in the Singapore equity market. This positive IVOL effect is stronger only for small market-statistic firms. But for the Large capital firms, the positive IVOL effect is insignificant. In addition, this paper shows that the relationship between maximum daily return over a month (MAX) and the subsequent month’s return is positive and significant in this market. However, IVOL is the true effect of this market rather than MAX.     

The information content of the term structure of risk-neutral skewness

We seek to reconcile the debate about the price effect of risk-neutral skewness (RNS) on stocks. We document positive predictability from short-term skewness, consistent with informed-trading demand, and negative predictability from long-term skewness, consistent with skewness preference. A term spread on RNS captures different information from long- and short-term contracts, resulting in stronger predictability. The quintile portfolio with the lowest spread outperforms that with highest spread by 14.64% annually. The term structure of RNS predicts earnings surprises and price crashes. We extract the slope factor from RNS term structure, estimate its risk premium, and explore its relation with several macroeconomic variables.     

Modelling conditional skewness: Heterogeneous beliefs,short sale restrictions and market declines

This paper tests the relationship among heterogeneous beliefs, short sale restrictions and time-varying conditional skewness under different market conditions. The results show that heterogeneous beliefs and short sale restrictions have negative impacts on conditional skewness during periods of market decline but have negative, positive or no impacts during periods of market growth. This evidence reconciles conflicting evidence in recent empirical studies on the relationship among heterogeneous beliefs, short sale restrictions and conditional skewness.     

Global investigation on the country-level idiosyncratic volatility and its determinants

Adapting the Fama–French three-factor model to a global context, this paper investigates idiosyncratic volatility as a measure of country-specific risk, and explores its determinants by using the equity and risk data of 47 developed and emerging countries during the period 1995–2016. We find the stock market turnover to have a positive and significant impact on the country-level idiosyncratic volatility, while information disclosure and investor uncertainty avoidance degree are negatively associated with country-level idiosyncratic risk. Moreover, improvements in economic, financial, and political risks, as measured by GDP growth, FX stability, foreign debt health, and non-corruption degree decrease the country-level idiosyncratic volatility significantly. Among all sets of market structure, investor preference, and economic, financial, and political risk variables considered, we find financial risk factors, FX stability and foreign debt health, to have the highest explanatory power over the cross-sectional differences in country-level idiosyncratic risk.     

Is idiosyncratic volatility priced in cryptocurrency markets?

This paper investigates how idiosyncratic volatility is priced in the cross-section of cryptocurrency returns. By conducting both portfolio-level analysis and Fama-MacBeth regression analysis, we demonstrate that idiosyncratic volatility is positively related to the expected returns of cryptocurrencies. This finding is not subsumed by effects of size, momentum, liquidity, volume, and price and is robust to different weighting schemes, holding periods, and sample sizes. Besides, we find no evidence of temporal relation between idiosyncratic volatility and returns in cryptocurrency markets.     

The utilitarian–maximin social welfare function and anomalies in social choice

Two major criteria of distributive justice are the utilitarian criterion and the maximin criterion. We offer a simple axiomatic characterization of a mixed utilitarian–maximin social welfare function. This social welfare function explains recent empirical violations of the standard cardinal social choice theory such as the social Allais paradox and the social common ratio effect. In addition, it offers a new foundation for the positively skewed wealth distributions in society. It also provides an objective function for mechanism design applications that trades off maximizing surplus and minimizing inequality.     

Skewness,short interest and the efficiency of stock prices

We examine the association between return skewness, short interest and the efficiency of stock prices. Since preferences for skewness have been shown to impact asset prices, we examine how skewness relates to market efficiency. We find that stocks with positive skewness are less efficient, which might be explained by investor preferences for positive skewness. Next, we document that short interest reduces both total skewness and idiosyncratic skewness. Finally, while research has shown that short selling can improve the efficiency of markets generally, we show that short interest’s ability to improve market efficiency is strongest in stocks with the highest skewness.     

C-CAPM Refinements and the Cross-Section of Returns

This paper studies if the consumption-based asset pricing model can explain the cross-section of expected returns. The CRRA model and several refinements (habit persistence and idiosyncratic shocks) all imply that the conditional expected return is linearly increasing in the asset’s conditional covariance with consumption growth. Results from quarterly data on the 25 Fama-French portfolios suggest that the model has serious problems: there are large and systematic pricing errors. In addition, the estimated time-varying effective risk aversion coefficients appear implausible and are unrelated with most candidates for habit persistence and idiosyncratic risk.