Skewness in Stock Returns: Reconciling the Evidence on Firm Versus Aggregate Returns

Rui Albuquerque

The Review of Financial Studies, 2012, vol. 25, issue 5, 1630-1673

Abstract: Aggregate stock market returns display negative skewness. Firm stock returns display positive skewness. The large literature that tries to explain the first stylized fact ignores the second. This article provides a unified theory that reconciles the two facts by explicitly modeling firm-level heterogeneity. I build a stationary asset pricing model of firm announcement events where firm returns display positive skewness. I then show that cross-sectional heterogeneity in firm announcement events can lead to conditional asymmetric stock return correlations and negative skewness in aggregate returns. I provide evidence consistent with the model predictions. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhr144 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Skewness in Stock Returns:Reconciling the Evidence on Firm versus Aggregate Returns (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:25:y:2012:i:5:p:1630-1673

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().