From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...

This paper studies the effects of financial speculation on commodity futures returns, using publicly available data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, aggregated by trader groups. We exploit the heteroskedasticity in the weekly data to identify exogenous variation in speculators'...

Aggregate implied volatility spread (IVS), defined as the cross-sectional average difference in the implied volatilities of at-the-money call and put equity options, is significantly and positively related to future stock market returns at daily, weekly, monthly, to semiannual horizons. This...

This paper studies the effects of financial speculation on commodity futures returns, using publicly available data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, aggregated by trader groups. We exploit the heteroskedasticity in the weekly data to identify exogenous variation in speculators'...