Following seminal works of Knight (1921) and Ellsberg (1961), we distinguish uncertainty from risk and examine the impact of aggregate uncertainty on return dynamics of size and book-to-market ratio sorted portfolios. Using VVIX as a proxy for aggregate uncertainty and controlling for market...

Asymmetric volatility in equity markets has been widely documented in finance, where two competing explanations, as considered in Bekaert and Wu (2000), are the financial leverage and the volatility feedback hypothesis. We explicitly test for the role of both hypotheses in explaining extreme...

We examine the impact of tail risk on the return dynamics of size, book-to-market ratio, momentum, and idiosyncratic volatility sorted portfolios. Our time-series analyses document significant portfolio return exposures to aggregate tail risk. In particular, portfolios that contain small, value,...