In this paper, we document evidence that downside betas tend to comove more than upside betas during a financial crisis, but upside betas tend to comove more than the downside betas during financial booms. We find that the asymmetry between Downside-Beta Comovement and Upside-Beta Comovement is...

Researchers and practitioners face many choices when estimating an asset's sensitivities toward risk factors, i.e., betas. Using the entire U.S. stock universe and a sample period of more than 50 years, we find that a historical estimator based on daily return data with an exponential weighting...

Researchers and practitioners employ a variety of time-series processes to forecast betas, using either short-memory models or implicitly imposing infinite memory. We find that both approaches are inadequate: beta factors show consistent long-memory properties. For the vast majority of stocks,...

Using a novel equity lending dataset, this paper is the first to show that expected returns strongly and negatively predict future equity lending fees. In comparing two expected return measures, I find that a rational expected return has stronger predictive power of future short selling activity...

We compare the performance of popular covariance forecasting models in the context of a portfolio of major European equity indices. We find that models based on high-frequency data offer a clear advantage in terms of statistical accuracy. They also yield more theoretically consistent predictions...

We survey the literature on stock return forecasting, highlighting the challenges faced by forecasters as well as strategies for improving return forecasts. We focus on U.S. equity premium forecastability and illustrate key issues via an empirical application based on updated data. Some studies...

The beta dispersion, which is the spread of betas on a stock market, can be interpreted as a measure of market vulnerability. This study examines the economic idea of the beta dispersion and its application as a market return predictor. Based on the empirical beta dispersion observed in the US...

We show that three prominent consumption-based asset pricing models - the Bansal-Yaron, Campbell-Cochrane and Cecchetti-Lam-Mark models - cannot explain the own-history predictability properties of stock market returns. We show this by estimating these models with GMM, deriving ex-ante expected...