Horizon-Specific Macroeconomic Risks and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns

We show that decomposing macroeconomic risks across horizon is key to uncover a tight link between risk premia and the real economy. Exposure in four-year returns to innovations in macroeconomic growth and volatility with a matching half-life of over four years is priced in a wide variety of test assets. Shorter-term risks are not priced. Importantly, we show that long-term growth and volatility capture largely common risk. We then propose a single, long-term, macroeconomic risk factor which drives out standard long-run risk measures and performs similar to the Fama-French three-factor model in cross-sectional tests. Our empirical results strongly support the use of long-horizon betas to measure macroeconomic risks in asset returns