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Nonlinearity and flight to safety in the risk-return trade-off for stocks and bonds

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Abstract

We document a highly significant, strongly nonlinear dependence of stock and bond returns on past equity market volatility as measured by the VIX. We propose a new estimator for the shape of the nonlinear forecasting relationship that exploits additional variation in the cross section of returns. The nonlinearities are mirror images for stocks and bonds, revealing flight to safety: expected returns increase for stocks when volatility increases from moderate to high levels, while they decline for Treasury securities. These findings provide support for dynamic asset pricing theories where the price of risk is a nonlinear function of market volatility.

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  • Tobias Adrian & Richard K. Crump & Erik Vogt, 2015. "Nonlinearity and flight to safety in the risk-return trade-off for stocks and bonds," Staff Reports 723, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:723
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    Keywords

    flight to safety; risk-return trade-off; dynamic asset pricing; volatility; nonparametric estimation and inference; intermediary asset pricing; asset management;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G17 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Financial Forecasting and Simulation

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