Cross-Section of Equity Returns: Stock Market Volatility and Priced Factors

We discuss the nature of risk valid factors should represent. The Campbell's (1993) ICAPM extended with heteroskedastic asset returns guides us to identify the risk; we show that many of empirically well-established factors contain information about the future changes in the investment opportunity set and that is why these factors are strongly priced across assets. Specifically, we show that size, momentum, liquidity (trading strategy based factors), industrial production growth, and inflation (macroeconomic factors) factors as well as both short- and long-run market volatility factors are significantly priced because they all have information about the changes in the future market volatility which characterizes the future investment opportunity set in our model. The time-series studies show that the above-mentioned factors do predict the market volatility and the cross-sectional studies show that these factors are priced due to their predictability on the future market volatility. Both studies are consistent and strongly support the relationship between the stock market volatility and the priced factors. By revealing the nature of risk the empirically well-established factors represent, we provide an explanation why we observe so many empirically strong factors in the literature.