Stock returns and volatility: pricing the short-run and long-run components of market risk

We decompose the time series of equity market risk into short- and long-run volatility components. Both components have negative and highly significant prices of risk in the cross section of equity returns. A three-factor model with the market return and the two volatility components compares favorably to benchmark models. We show that the short-run component captures market skewness risk, while the long-run component captures business cycle risk. Furthermore, short-run volatility is the more important cross-sectional risk factor, even though its average risk premium is smaller than the premium of the long-run component.