Report

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


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.

Keywords: flight to safety; risk-return trade-off; dynamic asset pricing; volatility; nonparametric estimation and inference; intermediary asset pricing; asset management;

JEL Classification: G01; G12; G17;

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Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Part of Series: Staff Reports

Publication Date: 2016-05-01

Number: 723