We investigate the risk-return trade-off on the US and European stock markets. We investigate the non-linear risk-return trade-off with a special eye to the tails of the stock returns using quantile regressions. We first consider the US stock market portfolio. We find that the risk-return...

Many modern macro finance models imply that excess returns on arbitrary assets are predictable via the price-dividend ratio and the variance risk premium of the aggregate stock market. We propose a simple empirical test for the ability of such a model to explain the cross-section of expected...

We study the problem of detecting structural instability of factor strength in asset pricing models for financial returns. We allow for strong and weaker factors, in which the sum of squared betas grows at a rate equal to and slower than the number of test assets, respectively: this growth rate...

We examine the pricing of tail risk in international stock markets. We find that the tail risk of different countries is highly integrated. Introducing a new World Fear index, we find that local and global aggregate market returns are mainly driven by global tail risk rather than local tail...

This paper empirically examines the well-known Chen-Roll-Ross model on the Croatian stock market. Modifications of definitions of the Chen-Roll-Ross model variables showed as necessary because of doubtful availability and quality of input data needed. Namely, some macroeconomic and market...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...