We uncover a positive stock market risk-return tradeoff after controlling for the covariance of market returns with the value premium. Fama and French (1996) conjecture that the value premium proxies for investment opportunities; therefore, by ignoring it, early specifications suffer from an...

Average idiosyncratic stock volatility forecasts the bilateral exchange rates of the US dollar against major foreign currencies in and out of sample. The US dollar tends to appreciate after an increase in US idiosyncratic volatility. Similarly, ceteris paribus, German and Japanese idiosyncratic...

Consistent with the post-1962 US evidence by Ang et al. [Ang, A., Hodrick, R., Xing Y., Zhang, X., 2006. The cross-section of volatility and expected returns. Journal of Finance 51, 259-299], we find that stocks with high idiosyncratic variance (IV) have low CAPM-adjusted expected returns in...

We argue that changes in average idiosyncratic volatility provide a proxy for changes in the investment opportunity set and that this proxy is closely related to the book-to-market factor. We test this idea in two ways using G7 countries' data. First, we show that idiosyncratic volatility has...