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Uncovering the Risk-Return Relation in the Stock Market

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Author Info
Hui Guo
Robert F. Whitelaw

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Abstract

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the apparent weak or negative relation between risk (conditional variance) and return (expected returns) in the aggregate stock market. We develop and estimate an empirical model based on the ICAPM to investigate this relation. Our primary innovation is to model and identify empirically the two components of expected returns--the risk component and the component due to the desire to hedge changes in investment opportunities. We also explicitly model the effect of shocks to expected returns on ex post returns and use implied volatility from traded options to increase estimation efficiency. As a result, the coefficient of relative risk aversion is estimated more precisely, and we find it to be positive and reasonable in magnitude. Although volatility risk is priced, as theory dictates, it contributes only a small amount to the time-variation in expected returns. Expected returns are driven primarily by the desire to hedge changes in investment opportunities. It is the omission of this hedge component that is responsible for the contradictory and counter-intuitive results in the existing literature.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 9927.

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Date of creation: Aug 2003
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9927

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G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Hui Guo & Zijun Wang & Jian Yang, 2006. "Does aggregate relative risk aversion change countercyclically over time? evidence from the stock market," Working Papers 2006-047, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  2. Ángel León & Juan Nave & Gonzalo Rubio, 2005. "The Relationship between Risk and Expected Return in Europe," DFAEII Working Papers 200508, University of the Basque Country - Department of Foundations of Economic Analysis II, revised 04 Jul 2006. [Downloadable!]
  3. Tobias Adrian & Joshua Rosenberg, 2006. "Stock returns and volatility: pricing the short-run and long-run components of market risk," Staff Reports 254, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  4. Hui Guo & Robert Savickas, 2006. "The relation between time-series and cross-sectional effects of idiosyncratic variance on stock returns in G7 countries," Working Papers 2006-036, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  5. Hui Guo & Christopher J. Neely & Jason Higbee, 2006. "Foreign exchange volatility is priced in equities," Working Papers 2004-029, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  6. Christian Conrad & Enno Mammen, 2008. "Nonparametric Regression on Latent Covariates with an Application to Semiparametric GARCH-in-Mean Models," Working Papers 0473, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics, revised Jul 2008. [Downloadable!]
  7. Long Chen & Hui Guo & Lu Zhang, 2006. "Equity market volatility and expected risk premium," Working Papers 2006-007, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  8. Dimitrios Thomakos & Michail Koubouros, 2008. "The Role of Realized Volatility in the Athens Stock Exchange," Working Papers 0020, University of Peloponnese, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  9. Turan Bali & Kamil Yilmaz, 2009. "The Intertemporal Relation between Expected Return and Risk on Currency," TÜSİAD-Koç University Economic Research Forum Working Papers 0909, TUSIAD-Koc University Economic Research Forum. [Downloadable!]
  10. Pástor, Luboš & Sinha, Meenakshi & Swaminathan, Bhaskaran, 2006. "Estimating the Intertemporal Risk-Return Tradeoff Using the Implied Cost of Capital," CEPR Discussion Papers 5462, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. Tim Bollerslev & Hao Zhou, 2006. "Expected stock returns and variance risk premia," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-11, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
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  12. Robert R. Bliss & Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, 2001. "Recovering risk aversion from options," Working Paper Series WP-01-15, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. [Downloadable!]
  13. Hui Guo & Robert Savickas, 2005. "Idiosyncratic volatility, stock market volatility, and expected stock returns," Working Papers 2003-028, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
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  14. Lin Peng & Turan G. Bali, 2006. "Is there a risk-return trade-off? Evidence from high-frequency data," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 21(8), pages 1169-1198. [Downloadable!]
  15. Anisha Ghosh & Oliver Linton, 2009. "Consistent estimation of the risk-return tradeoff in the presence of measurement error," Economics Working Papers we094928, Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía. [Downloadable!]
  16. Hui Guo & Christopher J. Neely, 2006. "Investigating the intertemporal risk-return relation in international stock markets with the component GARCH model," Working Papers 2006-006, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
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  17. Hui Guo & Robert Savickas & Zijun Wang & Jian Yang, 2006. "Is value premium a proxy for time-varying investment opportunities: some time series evidence," Working Papers 2005-026, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  18. Hui Guo & Jason Higbee, 2006. "Market timing with aggregate and idiosyncratic stock volatilities," Working Papers 2005-073, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  19. Jun Yu, 2006. "Temporal Aggregation and Risk-Return Relation," Working Papers 01-2007, Singapore Management University, School of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  20. Andrew Ang & Robert J. Hodrick & Yuhang Xing & Xiaoyan Zhang, 2004. "The Cross-Section of Volatility and Expected Returns," NBER Working Papers 10852, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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