Risk Preferences and The Macro Announcement Premium

Working Paper No. 22527 The paper develops a theory for equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre-scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium during the 1961-2014...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNBER Working Paper Series p. 22527
Main Authors Ai, Hengjie, Bansal, Ravi
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc 01.08.2016
Subjects
Economic theory
Equity
Expected utility
Investments
Macroeconomics
Preferences
Robust control
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Summary:Working Paper No. 22527 The paper develops a theory for equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre-scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium during the 1961-2014 period, and virtually 100% of it during the later period of 1997-2014, where more announcement data are available. We provide a characterization theorem for the set of intertemporal preferences that generate a positive announcement premium. Our theory establishes that the announcement premium identifies a significant deviation from expected utility and constitutes an asset market based evidence for a large class of non-expected models that features aversion to "Knightian uncertainty", for example, Gilboa and Schmeidler [30]. We also present a dynamic model to account for the evolution of equity premium around macroeconomic announcements.
ISSN:0898-2937
DOI:10.3386/w22527