We develop a strategy for utilizing higher moments, variance risk premia, and conditioning information efficiently, and hence improve on the variance bounds computed by Hansen and Jagannathan (1991); Gallant, Hansen, and Tauchen (1990); and Bekaert and Liu (2004). Our bounds reach existing...

Risk aversion functions extracted from observed stock and option prices can be negative, as shown by Aït-Sahalia and Lo (2000), Journal of Econometrics 94: 9--51; and Jackwerth (2000), The Review of Financial Studies 13(2), 433--51. We rationalize this puzzle by a lack of conditioning on latent...

We derive a measure of aggregate systemic risk, designated CATFIN, that complements bank-specific systemic risk measures by forecasting macroeconomic downturns six months into the future using out-of-sample tests conducted with U.S., European, and Asian bank data. Consistent with bank...

We derive a measure of aggregate systemic risk, designated CATFIN, that complements bank-specific systemic risk measures by forecasting macroeconomic downturns six months into the future using out-of-sample tests conducted with U.S., European, and Asian bank data. Consistent with bank...