We study the effects of stock market volatility on risk-taking and financial crises by constructing a cross-country database spanning up to 211 years and 60 countries. Prolonged periods of low volatility have strong in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power over the incidence of banking...

We document strong U.S. stock and bond return predictability from several macroeconomic volatility series before 1982, and a significant decline in this predictability during the Great Moderation. These findings are robust to alternative empirical specifications and out-of-sample tests. We...