Risk Aversion And Asset Prices

In recent years, portfolio flows to emerging markets have become increasingly large and volatile. Using weekly portfolio fund flows data, the paper finds that their short-run dynamics are driven mostly by global “push” factors. To what extent do these cross-border flows and global risk aversion drive asset volatility in emerging markets? We use a Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) Multivariate GARCH framework to estimate the impact of portfolio flows and the VIX index on three asset prices, namely equity returns, bond yields and exchange rates, in 17 emerging economies. The analysis shows that global risk aversion has a significant impact on the volatility of asset prices, while the magnitude of that impact correlates with country characteristics, including financial openness, the exchange rate regime, as well as macroeconomic fundamentals such as inflation and the current account balance. In line with earlier literature, portfolio flows to emerging markets are also found to affect the level of asset prices, as was the case in particular during the global financial crisis.

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Finanzen), language: English, abstract: This paper aims to explain the countercyclical behavior of the equity risk premium and the stock return volatility by introducing an external habit formation feature in the standard representative-agent consumption-based asset pricing model, in form of the so called “catching up with the Joneses” preferences. These preferences imply that the relative risk aversion of the agents in the economy is constant over time and varies across the agents, which generates an endogenous wealth process, that in turn creates a countercyclical behavior in the risk premium and the conditional stock return volatility. As the agents with lower risk aversion distribute a greater fraction of their wealth to risky assets, their wealth decreases relatively more in reaction to cyclical downturns, shifting the aggregate wealth towards more risk averse individuals. These more risk averse agents, however, demand a higher compensation for risk, leading to an increase of the aggregate equity risk premium in response to a fall in stock prices. One of the most studied topics in modern economics are the market mechanisms that lead to the determination of asset prices in an economy. The empirical research indicates that there is a link between the historically observed asset prices and macroeconomic developments. One of the most important observations are the countercyclical behavior of the equity risk premium and the stock return volatility, implying that the excess return of common stocks over the risk-free rate during business cycle troughs is significantly higher than during expansions.

The financial market melt-down of the years 2007-2009 has posed great challenges for studies on financial economics. This financial economics text focuses on the dynamic interaction of financial markets and economic activity. The financial market to be studied here encompasses the money and bond market, credit market, stock market and foreign exchange market; economic activity includes the actions and interactions of firms, banks, households, governments and countries. The book shows how economic activity affects asset prices and the financial market, and how asset prices and financial market volatility and crises impact economic activity. The book offers extensive coverage of new and advanced topics in financial economics such as the term structure of interest rates, credit derivatives and credit risk, domestic and international portfolio theory, multi-agent and evolutionary approaches, capital asset pricing beyond consumption-based models, and dynamic portfolio decisions. Moreover a completely new section of the book is dedicated to the recent financial market meltdown of the years 2007-2009. Emphasis is placed on empirical evidence relating to episodes of financial instability and financial crises in the U.S. and in Latin American, Asian and Euro-area countries. Overall, the book explains what researchers and practitioners in the financial sector need to know about the financial-real interaction, and what practitioners and policy makers need to know about the financial market.

This paper presents a statistical and economic interpretation of the low and often economically implausible risk aversion estimates obtained for fixed income assets throughout the finance literature. For a statistical interpretation, Monte Carlo simulations are used to demonstrate that specification errors introduce a serious downward bias in parameter estimates derived from the standard asset pricing model. For an economic interpretation, an international version of the asset pricing model is presented. The model suggests that by reducing the effect of country specific disturbances, an international measure of consumption growth yields more accurate risk aversion estimates than a national measure. The results of asset pricing tests suggest that risk aversion estimates derived from models constructed for the international measures are economically plausible and close to each other across eight industrialized economies. These results are robust for several asset returns.

This dissertation critically analyses the relationship among risk-aversion, the variance exhibited by the risk premium and time-varying variance (volatility) in asset prices. The results generated by this investigation are both theoretical and empirical in nature. The theoretical contribution made by this dissertation to the literature of financial economics consists of a more general explanation (than the existing one) about how risk aversion on the part of economic agents may cause asset prices to exhibit greater time-varying variance than when economic agents are less risk averse or risk neutral. The empirical contribution made by this dissertation to the literature consists of a detailed experimental analysis of the relationship among risk-aversion, the variance exhibited by the risk premium and time-varying variance (volatility) in asset prices.

We provide an axiomatic model of preferences over atemporal risks that generalizes Gul (1991) A Theory of Disappointment Aversion' by allowing risk aversion to be first order' at locations in the state space that do not correspond to certainty. Since the lotteries being valued by an agent in an asset-pricing context are not typically local to certainty, our generalization, when embedded in a dynamic recursive utility model, has important quantitative implications for financial markets. We show that the state-price process, or asset-pricing kernel, in a Lucas-tree economy in which the representative agent has generalized disappointment aversion preferences is consistent with the pricing kernel that resolves the equity-premium puzzle. We also demonstrate that a small amount of conditional heteroskedasticity in the endowment-growth process is necessary to generate these favorable results. In addition, we show that risk aversion in our model can be both state-dependent and counter-cyclical, which empirical research has demonstrated is necessary for explaining observed asset-pricing behavior.