The prevailing view of implied volatility comovements, IVC, defined as the correlation between a firm's implied volatility and the market's implied volatility, is that they indicate the presence of systematic volatility risk to the firm's investors. We take a different stance and conjecture that...

The continuing volatility in equity markets following the global financial crisis has led the focus of the global investment community towards low volatility stocks. This pursuit of low risk investments has drawn attention of the investor community towards new, alternative investments avenues...

This paper studies the relationship between asset growth and idiosyncratic stock return volatility. Empirically, in the cross-section, firms' idiosyncratic return volatility has a V-shaped relationship with their asset growth rate. In the time series, dispersion across firms in asset growth...

Firms with lower profitability have lower expected returns because such firms perform better than expected when market volatility increases. The better-than-expected performance arises because unprofitable firms are distressed and volatile, their equity resembles a call option on the assets, and...

In this paper, I test the performance of the CAPM, Fama-French three-factor and Carhart four-factor models on the Polish market. I use stock level data from April 2001 to January 2014. I find strong evidence for the value and momentum effects, but only weak evidence for the size premium. I form...

This study examines the relation between aggregate volatility risk and the cross-section of stock returns in Australia. We use a stock's sensitivity to innovations in the ASX200 implied volatility (VIX) as a proxy for aggregate volatility risk. Consistent with theoretical predictions, aggregate...

Due to arbitrage risk asymmetries, the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns is positive (negative) among overpriced (underpriced) stocks. We offer a new active anomaly-selection strategy that capitalizes on this effect. To this end, we consider eleven equity anomalies in...

In this note we document interactive relations between the excess volatility and the momentum effect in the cross-section of stock returns over the sample periods of 1963-1989, 1990-2010 and 1963-2010, along the line explored lately in Wang and Ma (2014). The nature of interactive relations...

This paper investigates whether news suggestive of irrationality within financial markets have an impact on stock returns. We construct a lexicon of words for 'market irrationality' and score daily news articles based on the number and proportion of words they contain from the lexicon. We find...

The idiosyncratic volatility anomaly, as first documented in Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006), has received considerable attention in the literature. In this paper, we examine the pervasiveness of the anomaly in various stock samples and provide evidence towards distinguishing potential...