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Can Growth Options Explain the Trend in Idiosyncratic Risk?

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Author Info

  • Charles Cao
  • Timothy Simin
  • Jing Zhao

Abstract

While recent studies document increasing idiosyncratic volatility over the past four decades, an explanation for this trend remains elusive. We establish a theoretical link between growth options available to managers and the idiosyncratic risk of equity. Empirically both the level and variance of corporate growth options are significantly related to idiosyncratic volatility. Accounting for growth options eliminates or reverses the trend in aggregate firm-specific risk. These results are robust for different measures of idiosyncratic volatility, different growth option proxies, across exchanges, and through time. Finally, our results suggest that growth options explain the trend in idiosyncratic volatility beyond alternative explanations. The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org., Oxford University Press.

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File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhl039
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Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Society for Financial Studies in its journal The Review of Financial Studies.

Volume (Year): 21 (2008)
Issue (Month): 6 (November)
Pages: 2599-2633

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Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:21:y:2008:i:6:p:2599-2633

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Cited by:
  1. Foucault, Thierry & Gehrig, Thomas, 2008. "Stock price informativeness, cross-listings, and investment decisions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(1), pages 146-168, April.
  2. Brockman, Paul & Liebenberg, Ivonne & Schutte, Maria, 2010. "Comovement, information production, and the business cycle," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(1), pages 107-129, July.
  3. Rubin, Amir & Smith, Daniel R., 2011. "Comparing different explanations of the volatility trend," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 1581-1597, June.
  4. José Gonzalo Rangel & Robert F. Engle, 2012. "The Factor--Spline--GARCH Model for High and Low Frequency Correlations," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 30(1), pages 109-124, January.
  5. Brown, Gregory & Kapadia, Nishad, 2007. "Firm-specific risk and equity market development," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 358-388, May.
  6. Geert Bekaert & Robert J. Hodrick & Xiaoyan Zhang, 2010. "Aggregate Idiosyncratic Volatility," NBER Working Papers 16058, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  7. Desai, Chintal A. & Savickas, Robert, 2010. "On the causes of volatility effects of conglomerate breakups," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(4), pages 554-571, September.
  8. Rubin, Amir & Smith, Daniel R., 2009. "Institutional ownership, volatility and dividends," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 627-639, April.
  9. Guo, Hui & Savickas, Robert, 2010. "Relation between time-series and cross-sectional effects of idiosyncratic variance on stock returns," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(7), pages 1637-1649, July.

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