The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.
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On Stable Factor Structures in the Pricing of Risk: Do Time‐Varying Betas Help or Hurt?
Published: 12/17/2002 | DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.224803
Eric Ghysels
There is now considerable evidence suggesting that estimated betas of unconditional capital asset pricing models (CAPMs) exhibit statistically significant time variation. Therefore, many have advocated the use of conditional CAPMs. If we succeed in capturing the dynamics of beta risk, we are sure to outperform constant beta models. However, if the beta risk is inherently misspecified, there is a real possibility that we commit serious pricing errors, potentially larger than with a constant traditional beta model. In this paper we show that this is indeed the case, namely that pricing errors with constant traditional beta models are smaller than with conditional CAPMs.
Ex Ante Skewness and Expected Stock Returns
Published: 12/27/2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2012.01795.x
JENNIFER CONRAD, ROBERT F. DITTMAR, ERIC GHYSELS
We use option prices to estimate ex ante higher moments of the underlying individual securities’ risk‐neutral returns distribution. We find that individual securities’ risk‐neutral volatility, skewness, and kurtosis are strongly related to future returns. Specifically, we find a negative (positive) relation between ex ante volatility (kurtosis) and subsequent returns in the cross‐section, and more ex ante negatively (positively) skewed returns yield subsequent higher (lower) returns. We analyze the extent to which these returns relations represent compensation for risk and find evidence that, even after controlling for differences in co‐moments, individual securities’ skewness matters.
Why Invest in Emerging Markets? The Role of Conditional Return Asymmetry
Published: 05/23/2016 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12420
ERIC GHYSELS, ALBERTO PLAZZI, ROSSEN VALKANOV
We propose a quantile‐based measure of conditional skewness, particularly suitable for handling recalcitrant emerging market (EM) returns. The skewness of international stock market returns varies significantly across countries over time, and persists at long horizons. In EMs, skewness is mostly positive and idiosyncratic, and significantly relates to a country's financial and trade openness and balance of payments. In an international portfolio setting, return asymmetry leads to sizeable certainty‐equivalent gains and increases the weight on emerging countries to about 30%. Investing in EMs seems to be about expectations of a higher upside than downside, consistent with recent theories.
Price Discovery without Trading: Evidence from the Nasdaq Preopening
Published: 12/17/2002 | DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.00249
Charles Cao, Eric Ghysels, Frank Hatheway
This paper studies Nasdaq market makers' activities during the one and one‐half hour preopening period. Price discovery during the preopening is conducted via price signaling as opposed to the auction used to open the NYSE or the continuous market used during trading. In the absence of trades, Nasdaq dealers use crossed and locked inside quotes to signal to other market makers which direction the price should move. Furthermore, we find evidence of price leadership among market makers that bears little resemblance to their IPO/SEO lead underwriter participation.