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...

This paper proposes a novel approach to extracting option-implied equity premia, and empirically examines the information content of these risk premia for forecasting the stock market return. Our approach does not require specifying the functional form of the pricing kernel, and does not impose...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium predicts aggregate stock market returns. We demonstrate that statistical finite sample biases cannot “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing evidence of the U.S., we show that country...

This paper presents predictability evidence of the implied-expected variance difference, or variance risk premium, for financial market risk premia: (1) the variance difference measure predicts a positive risk premium across equity, bond, currency, and credit markets; (2) such a short-run...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium predicts aggregate stock market returns. We demonstrate that statistical finite sample biases cannot “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing evidence of the U.S., we show that country...

We find that interest rate variance risk premium (IRVRP) - the difference between implied and realized variances of interest rates - is a strong predictor of U.S. Treasury bond returns of maturities ranging between one and ten years for return horizons up to six months. IRVRP is not subsumed by...

We find out-of-sample predictability of commodity futures excess returns using forecast combinations of 28 potential predictors. Such gains in forecast accuracy translate into economically significant improvements in certainty equivalent returns and Sharpe ratios for a mean-variance investor....

We discover a new currency strategy with highly desirable return and diversification properties, which uses the predictive capability of currency volatility risk premia for currency returns. The volatility risk premium -- the difference between expected realized volatility and model-free implied...