The Term Structure of the Risk-Return Trade-Off

The Term Structure of the Risk-Return Trade-Off
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 54
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

Expected excess returns on bonds and stocks, real interest rates, and risk shift over time in predictable ways. Furthermore, these shifts tend to persist for long periods. Changes in investment opportunities can alter the risk-return trade-off of bonds, stocks, and cash across investment horizons, thus creating a term structure of the risk-return trade-off. This term structure can be extracted from a parsimonious model of return dynamics, as is illustrated with data from the U.S. stock and bond markets.

Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

The Risk Return Tradeoff in the Long-Run

The Risk Return Tradeoff in the Long-Run
Author: Christian T. Lundblad
Publisher:
Total Pages: 53
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

The risk-return tradeoff is fundamental to finance. However, while many asset pricing models imply a positive relationship between the risk premium on the market portfolio and the variance of its return, previous studies find the empirical relationship is weak at best. In sharp contrast, this study, demonstrates that the weak empirical relationship is an artifact of the small sample nature of the available data, as an extremely large number of time-series observations is required to precisely estimate this relationship. To maximize the available time-series, I employ the nearly two century history of US equity market returns from Schwert (1990), exploring the empirical risk-return tradeoff for a variety of specifications that allow for asymmetric volatility, regime-switching, and additional factors associated with intertemporal (ICAPM) hedging demands. Similar to studies that use the more recent US equity price history, conditional market volatility in the historical data is persistent and displays strong asymmetric relationships to return innovations. Further, the conditional correlation between stock and bond markets is closely related to periods of documented financial crises. Finally, in contrast to evidence based upon the recent US experience, the estimated relationship between risk and return is positive and statistically significant across every specification considered.

Risk and Return Trade-Off in the U.S. Treasury Market

Risk and Return Trade-Off in the U.S. Treasury Market
Author: Eric Ghysels
Publisher:
Total Pages: 41
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper characterizes the risk-return trade-off in the U.S. Treasury market. We propose a discrete-time no-arbitrage term structure model, in which bond prices are solved in closed form and the conditional variances of bond yields are decomposed into a short-run component and a long-run component, each of which follows a GARCH-type process. Estimated using Treasury yields data from January 1962 to August 2007, our model simultaneously matches the conditional volatility dynamics and the deviation from the expectations hypothesis in the data. We find that a higher short-run volatility component of bond yields significantly predicts a higher future excess return, above and beyond the predictive power of the yields. The long-run volatility component does not predict bond excess returns.

Volatility

Volatility
Author: Robert A. Jarrow
Publisher:
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1998
Genre: Derivative securities
ISBN:

Written by a number of authors, this text is aimed at market practitioners and applies the latest stochastic volatility research findings to the analysis of stock prices. It includes commentary and analysis based on real-life situations.

Risk Profiling and Tolerance: Insights for the Private Wealth Manager

Risk Profiling and Tolerance: Insights for the Private Wealth Manager
Author: Joachim Klement
Publisher: CFA Institute Research Foundation
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1944960473

If risk aversion and willingness to take on risk are driven by emotions and we as humans are bad at correctly identifying them, the finance profession has a serious challenge at hand—how to reliably identify the individual risk profile of a retail investor or high-net-worth individual. In this series of CFA Institute Research Foundation briefs, we have asked academics and practitioners to summarize the current state of knowledge about risk profiling in different key areas.

Financial Markets and the Real Economy

Financial Markets and the Real Economy
Author: John H. Cochrane
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1933019158

Financial Markets and the Real Economy reviews the current academic literature on the macroeconomics of finance.

Introduction to Business

Introduction to Business
Author: Lawrence J. Gitman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1455
Release: 2024-09-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.