What do asset prices have to say about risk appetite and uncertainty?
Geert Bekaert and
Marie Hoerova
Journal of Banking & Finance, 2016, vol. 67, issue C, 103-118
Abstract:
Building on intuition from the dynamic asset pricing literature, we uncover unobserved risk aversion and fundamental uncertainty from the observed time series of the variance premium and the credit spread while controlling for the conditional variance of stock returns, expectations about the macroeconomic outlook, and interest rates. We apply this methodology to monthly data from both Germany and the US. We find that the variance premium contains a substantial amount of information about risk aversion whereas the credit spread has a lot to say about uncertainty. We link our risk aversion and uncertainty estimates to practitioner and “academic” risk aversion indices, sentiment indices, financial stress indices, business cycle indicators and liquidity measures.
Keywords: Economic uncertainty; Risk aversion; Time variation in risk and return; Credit spread; Volatility dynamics; Financial stress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E44 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (49)
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Working Paper: What do asset prices have to say about risk appetite and uncertainty? (2009) 
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:67:y:2016:i:c:p:103-118
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2015.06.015
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