We develop a methodology to decompose the conditional market risk premium and risk premia on higher-order moments of excess market returns into components related to contingent claims on down, up, and moderate market returns. The decompositions do not depend on assumptions about investor...

Inspired by Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009), we propose risk-neutral options' implied measures of riskiness and investigate their significance in predicting the cross section of expected returns per unit of risk. The empirical analyses indicate a negative and significant...

In this paper, we intend to explain an empirical finding that distressed stocks delivered anomalously low returns (Campbell et. al. (2008)). We show that in a model where investors have heterogeneous preferences, the expected return of risky assets depends on idiosyncratic coskewness betas,...

In this paper, I show that the variance of Fama-French factors, the variance of the momentum factor, as well as the correlation between these factors, predict an important fraction of the time-series variation in post-1990 aggregate stock market returns. This predictability is particularly...

I use option prices to infer real-time moments of stochastic discount factors (SDFs). The moments are estimated, from daily SP 500 index option data, in real time, without relying on past observations. These moments are forward-looking and significantly predict the market excess return. The...

In this paper, we develop lower bounds on the variance of the permanent component and the transitory component, and on the variance of the ratio of the permanent to the transitory components of SDFs. Exactly solved eigenfunction problems are then used to study the empirical attributes of asset...