Aggregate idiosyncratic volatility in G7 countries

The paper analyzes average idiosyncratic volatility in G7 countries. We find that idiosyncratic volatility is highly correlated across countries and there is a significant Granger causality from the U.S. to the other countries and vice versa. Consistent with U.S. data, when combined with stock market volatility, idiosyncratic volatility has significant predictive power for stock market returns and the value premium in many other G7 countries. Moreover, in U.S. data, idiosyncratic volatility has explanatory power for stock returns very similar to that of value premium volatility in both time-series and cross-sectional regressions. Our results suggest that idiosyncratic volatility proxies for systematic risk omitted from CAPM.Stock exchanges

Idiosyncratic volatility, economic fundamentals, and foreign exchange rates

This paper shows that a relatively high level of average U.S. industry- or firm-level idiosyncratic stock volatility is usually associated with a future appreciation in the U.S. dollar. For most foreign currencies, the relation is statistically significant in both in sample and out-of-sample tests, even after we use a bootstrap procedure to explicitly account for data mining. We also document a positive and significant relation between a country’s idiosyncratic volatility and the future U.S. dollar price of its currency—in France, Germany, and Japan. Moreover, among a number of commonly used financial variables, only idiosyncratic volatility forecasts output growth in both U.S. and foreign countries. Our results suggest that there might be a close link between exchange rates and economic fundamentals. ; Earlier title: Foreign exchange rates don't follow a random walkForeign exchange ; International finance

Does idiosyncratic risk matter: another look

We show that the equal-weighted average stock volatility analyzed by Goyal and Santa-Clara (GS, 2003) forecasts stock returns because of its co-movements with stock market volatility. Moreover, contrary to the positive relation hypothesized by GS and many others, we find that the value-weighted average stock volatility is negatively related to future stock returns when combined with stock market volatility. This puzzling result reflects the fact that the alue-weighted average stock volatility is negatively correlated with the consumption-wealth ratio, and its predictive power vanishes if we control for the latter in the forecasting equation. The idiosyncratic volatility proposed by GS thus provides no information beyond the forecasting variables advocated by Guo (2003)2:26 PM 10/17/03Stock market ; Asset pricing

Understanding stock return predictability

Over the period 1927:Q1 to 2005:Q4, the average CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) and stock market variance jointly forecast stock market returns. This result holds up quite well in a number of robustness checks, and we show that the predictive power of the average IV might come from its close relation with systematic risk omitted from CAPM. First, high lagged returns on high IV stocks predict low future returns on the market as a whole. Second, returns on a hedging portfolio that is long in stocks with low IV and short in stocks with high IV perform as well as the value premium in explaining the cross-section of stock returns. Third, realized variance of the hedging portfolio or of the value premium is closely correlated with the average IV, and these variables have similar predictive power for stock returns.Stock exchanges ; Stock - Prices

The relation between time-series and cross-sectional effects of idiosyncratic variance on stock returns in G7 countries

This paper suggests that CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) correlates negatively with future stock returns because it is a proxy for loadings on discount-rate shocks in Campbell*s (1993) ICAPM. The ICAPM also implies that there are important links between the time-series and cross-sectional IV effects. For example, the coefficients on conditional stock market variance and value-weighted average IV obtained from the time-series regressions reflect loadings on stock market returns and discount-rate shocks, respectively; therefore, they should help explain the cross section of stock returns. Moreover, we expect a close relation between the IV and book-to-market effects because recent studies show that the latter also reflects intertemporal pricing. These conjectures are strongly supported by the G7 countries* data.Stock exchanges

Idiosyncratic volatility, stock market volatility, and expected stock returns

We find that the value-weighted idiosyncratic stock volatility and aggregate stock market volatility jointly exhibit strong predictive power for excess stock market returns. The stock market risk-return relation is found to be positive, as stipulated by the CAPM; however, idiosyncratic volatility is negatively related to future stock market returns. Also, idiosyncratic volatility appears to be a pervasive macrovariable, and its forecasting abilities are very similar to those of the consumption-wealth ratio proposed by Lettau and Ludvigson (2001).Stock market ; Asset pricing

Is value premium a proxy for time-varying investment opportunities: some time series evidence

We uncover a positive, empirical risk-return tradeoff in the stock market after controlling for the covariance of stock market returns with the value premium. The underlying premise is that, as conjectured by Fama and French (1996), the value premium is a proxy for time-varying investment opportunities. By ignoring the value premium, early specifications suffer from an omitted variable problem that leads to a downward bias in the estimate of the risk-return tradeoff. The paper also documents a new finding on a significantly positive relation between the value premium and its conditional variance.Time-series analysis ; Stocks