Dispersion and Volatility in Stock Returns: An Empirical Investigation

John Campbell, Sangjoon Kim and Martin Lettau

No 1923, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper studies three different measures of monthly stock market volatility: the time-series volatility of daily market returns within the month; the cross-sectional volatility or ‘dispersion’ of daily returns on industry portfolios, relative to the market, within the month; and the dispersion of daily returns on individual firms, relative to their industries, within the month. Over the period 1962–95 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. All the volatility measures move together in a countercyclical fashion. While market volatility tends to lead the other volatility series, industry-level volatility is a particularly important leading indicator for the business cycle.

Keywords: Business Cycles; dispersion; Volatility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 G10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=1923 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Dispersion and Volatility in Stock Returns: An Empirical Investigation (1999)
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:cpr:ceprdp:1923

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/ ... ers/dp.php?dpno=1923

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().