Search Results
Journal Article
Volatile firms, stable economy
Journal Article
Foreign exchange rates are predictable!
Journal Article
Stock market returns, volatility, and future output
In this article, Hui Guo shows that, if stock volatility follows an AR(1) process, stock market returns relate positively to past volatility but relate negatively to contemporaneous volatility in Merton?s (1973) Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model. The model helps explain the recent finding that stock market volatility drives out returns in forecasting real gross domestic product growth because the predictive power of returns is hampered by their positive correlation with past volatility. If the positive relation between returns and past volatility is controlled for, however, the author ...
Journal Article
Stock market volatility: reading the meter
Working Paper
Idiosyncratic volatility, economic fundamentals, and foreign exchange rates
This paper shows that a relatively high level of average U.S. industry- or firm-level idiosyncratic stock volatility is usually associated with a future appreciation in the U.S. dollar. For most foreign currencies, the relation is statistically significant in both in sample and out-of-sample tests, even after we use a bootstrap procedure to explicitly account for data mining. We also document a positive and significant relation between a country?s idiosyncratic volatility and the future U.S. dollar price of its currency?in France, Germany, and Japan. Moreover, among a number of commonly used ...
Working Paper
Is value premium a proxy for time-varying investment opportunities: some time series evidence
We uncover a positive, empirical risk-return tradeoff in the stock market after controlling for the covariance of stock market returns with the value premium. The underlying premise is that, as conjectured by Fama and French (1996), the value premium is a proxy for time-varying investment opportunities. By ignoring the value premium, early specifications suffer from an omitted variable problem that leads to a downward bias in the estimate of the risk-return tradeoff. The paper also documents a new finding on a significantly positive relation between the value premium and its conditional ...
Working Paper
Market timing with aggregate and idiosyncratic stock volatilities
Guo and Savickas [2005] show that aggregate stock market volatility and average idiosyncratic stock volatility jointly forecast stock returns. In this paper, we quantify the economic significance of their results from the perspective of a portfolio manager. That is, we evaluate the performance, e.g., the Sharpe ratio and Jensen's alpha, of a mean-variance manager who tries to time the market based on those two variables. We find that, over the period 1968-2004, the associated market-timing strategy outperforms the buy-and-hold strategy, and the difference is statistically and economically ...
Working Paper
Investigating the intertemporal risk-return relation in international stock markets with the component GARCH model
We revisit the risk-return relation using the component GARCH model and international daily MSCI stock market data. In contrast with the previous evidence obtained from weekly and monthly data, daily data show that the relation is positive in almost all markets and often statistically significant. Likelihood ratio tests reject the standard GARCH model in favor of the component GARCH model, which strengthens the evidence for a positive risk-return tradeoff. Consistent with U.S. evidence, the long-run component of volatility is a more important determinant of the conditional equity premium than ...
Working Paper
Equity market volatility and expected risk premium
This paper revisits the time-series relation between the conditional risk premium and variance of the equity market portfolio. The main innovation is that we construct a measure of the ex ante equity market risk premium using corporate bond yield spread data. This measure is forward-looking and does not rely critically on either realized equity returns or instrumental variables. We find strong support for a positive risk-return tradeoff, and this result is not sensitive to a number of robustness checks, including alternative proxies of the conditional stock variance and controls for hedging ...
Working Paper
Understanding stock return predictability
Over the period 1927:Q1 to 2005:Q4, the average CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) and stock market variance jointly forecast stock market returns. This result holds up quite well in a number of robustness checks, and we show that the predictive power of the average IV might come from its close relation with systematic risk omitted from CAPM. First, high lagged returns on high IV stocks predict low future returns on the market as a whole. Second, returns on a hedging portfolio that is long in stocks with low IV and short in stocks with high IV perform as well as the value premium in ...