Theoretical models, such as the CAPM, predict a positive relation between risk and return, but the empirical evidence paints a mixed picture. Positive, flat and negative relations have been reported in various empirical studies. In this paper we reconcile these seemingly conflicting results by...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) predicts a positive relation between risk and return, but empirical studies find the actual relation to be flat, or even negative. This paper provides a broad overview of explanations for this ‘volatility effect' that have been proposed in different...

Stocks with low return volatility have high risk-adjusted returns, which might be driven by low media attention for such stocks. Using news coverage data we formally test whether the ‘attention-grabbing' hypothesis can explain the volatility effect for a sample of international stocks over the...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) predicts a positive relation between risk and return, but empirical studies find the actual relation to be flat, or even negative. This paper provides a broad overview of explanations for this ‘volatility effect' that have been proposed in different...

We propose a practical investment framework for dynamic asset allocation across different economic regimes, which we illustrate using a sample of U.S. data from 1948 to 2007. We identify four regimes in the economic cycle and find that these regimes capture pronounced time-variation in the risk...

High-risk stocks do not have higher returns than low-risk stocks in all major stock markets. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of this low-risk effect, from the earliest asset pricing studies in the nineteen seventies to the most recent empirical findings and interpretations since....

Stocks with high uncertainty about risk, as measured by the volatility of volatility (vol-of-vol), robustly underperform stocks with low uncertainty about risk by 10 percent per year. This vol-of-vol effect is distinct from (combinations of) at least twenty previously documented return...