The variance risk premium represents the compensation paid to index option sellers for the risk of losses following upward movements in realized market return volatility. Common wisdom connects these spikes with elevated uncertainty on economic fundamentals. I incorporate this link within a...

I use Bayesian tools to develop a dynamic testing methodology for conditional factor pricing models, in which time-varying betas, idiosyncratic risks, and factors risk premia are jointly estimated in a single step. Based on this framework, I test over fifty years of post-war monthly data some of...

We develop a new variational Bayes estimation method for large-dimensional sparse vector autoregressive models with exogenous predictors. Unlike existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational Bayes (VB) algorithms, our approach is not based on a structural form representation of the...

We show that low-order autoregression models for short-term expected returns imply long-term dynamics that have a (too) fast vanishing persistence when compared with the evidence from long-horizon predictive regressions. We then propose a novel modeling framework that exploits the low-frequency...

We provide a measure of sparsity for expected returns within the context of classical factor models. Our measure is inversely related to the percentage of active predictors. Empirically, sparsity varies over time and displays an apparent countercyclical behavior. Proxies for financial conditions...

We provide empirical evidence that the returns on US equity momentum exhibit a time-varying skewness which deepens during dramatic losses (crashes). As a result, the dynamics of the strategy expected returns reflects the time variation in both conditional volatility and skewness. This has first...