My dissertation consists of three essays, which cover topics in theoretical and empirical finance. In the first essay titled "the skewness premium and the asymmetric volatility puzzle," we use a general equilibrium model to study the source and reward of asymmetric volatility or skewness of...

The dissertation is focused on studying the behavior of aggregate asset market and its relationship to real economic activity. Chapter 1 offers a new empirical perspective on the relationship between the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns. Chapter 2 builds a general equilibrium...