Does aggregate relative risk aversion change countercyclically over time? evidence from the stock market
By: by Hui Guo, Zijun Wang, and Jian Yang.
Contributors: Wang, Zijun.; Yang, Jian, 1971-; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Series: Working paper -- 2006-047A; Working paper (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis : Online) -- 2006-047A.
Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Published: 2006
Place of publication: [St. Louis, Mo.]
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "Using a semiparametric estimation technique, we show that the risk-return tradeoff and the Sharpe ratio of the stock market increases monotonically with the consumption wealth ratio (CAY) across time.  While early studies have commonly interpreted such a finding as evidence of the countercyclical variation in aggregate relative risk aversion (RRA), we argue that it mainly reflects changes in investment opportunities for two reasons.  First, we fail to reject the null hypothesis of constant RRA after controlling for CAY as a proxy for the hedge against changes in the investment opportunity set.  Second, by contrast with habit formation models but consistent with ICAPM, we find that loadings on the conditional stock market variance scaled by CAY are negatively priced in the cross-sectional regressions.  For illustration, we replicate the countercyclical stock market risk-return tradeoff using simulated data from Guo's (2004) limited stock market participation model, in which RRA is constant and CAY is a proxy for shareholders' liquidity conditions"--Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 8/14/2006.

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