This article examines the role of idiosyncratic volatility in explaining the cross-sectional variation of size- and value-sorted portfolio returns. We show that the premium for bearing idiosyncratic volatility varies inversely with the number of stocks included in the portfolios. This conclusion...

A vast literature has documented the value premium and the small firm effect as pervasive stylized facts in empirical asset pricing and yet research has been largely unable to provide entirely convincing explanations of why these phenomena exist. This paper demonstrates that the cross-sectional...

The article examines whether commodity risk is priced in the cross-section of global equity returns. We employ a long-only equally-weighted portfolio of commodity futures and a term structure portfolio that captures phases of backwardation and contango as mimicking portfolios for commodity risk....

This paper develops a new measure of return asymmetry, following Patil et al. (2012). We demonstrate that the return asymmetry measure helps explain the cross section of stock returns. Consistent with results in Barberis and Huang (2008), our empirical findings show that stocks with high return...