Hanno Lustig

The Returns on Human Capital: Good News on Wall Street is Bad News on Main Street

We use a standard single-agent model to conduct a simple consumption growth accounting exercise. Consumption growth is driven by news about current and expected future returns on the market portfolio. We impute the residual of consumption growth innovations that cannot be attributed to either news about financial asset returns or future labor income growth to news about expected future returns on human wealth, and we back out the implied human wealth and market return process. Innovations in current and future human wealth returns are negatively correlated with innovations in current and future financial asset returns, regardless of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

The common factor in idiosyncratic volatility: Quantitative asset pricing implications

We show that firms’ idiosyncratic volatility obeys a strong factor structure and that shocks to the common factor in idiosyncratic volatility (CIV) are priced. Stocks in the lowest CIV-beta quintile earn average returns 5.4% per year higher than those in the highest quintile. The CIV factor helps to explain a number of asset pricing anomalies. We provide new evidence linking the CIV factor to income risk faced by households. These three facts are consistent with an incomplete markets heterogeneous-agent model. In the model, CIV is a priced state variable because an increase in idiosyncratic firm volatility raises the average household’s marginal utility. The calibrated model matches the high degree of comovement in idiosyncratic volatilities, the CIV-beta return spread, and several other asset price moments.

Too-Systemic-To-Fail: What Option Markets Imply About Sector-Wide Government Guarantees

We examine the pricing of financial crash insurance during the 2007-2009 financial crisis in U.S. option markets. A large amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the price of financial sector crash insurance during the financial crisis. The difference in costs of out-of-the-money put options for individual banks, and puts on the financial sector index, increases fourfold from its pre-crisis 2003-2007 level. We provide evidence that a collective government guarantee for the financial sector, which lowers index put prices far more than those of individual banks, explains the divergence in the basket-index put spread.

When is Market Incompleteness Irrelevant for the Price of Aggregate Risk (and When is it Not)

In a standard incomplete markets model with a continuum of households that have constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) preferences, the absence of insurance markets for idiosyncratic labor income risk has no effect on the premium for aggregate risk if the distribution of idiosyncratic risk is independent of aggregate shocks and aggregate consumption growth is independent over time. In equilibrium, households only use the stock market to smooth consumption; the bond market is inoperative. Furthermore, the cross-sectional distributions of wealth and consumption are not affected by aggregate shocks. These results hold regardless of the persistence of idiosyncratic shocks, even when households face tight solvency constraints. A weaker irrelevance result survives when we allow for predictability in aggregate consumption growth.

Business Cycle Variation in the Risk-Return Trade-Off

In the United States and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the expected returns on stocks, adjusted for volatility, are much higher in recessions than in expansions. We consider feasible trading strategies that buy or sell shortly after business cycle turning points that are identifiable in real time and involve holding periods of up to 1 year. The observed business cycle changes in expected returns are not spuriously driven by changes in expected near-term dividend growth. Our findings imply that value-maximizing managers face much higher risk-adjusted costs of capital in their investment decisions during recessions than expansions.

Why Does the Treasury Issue TIPS? The TIPS-Treasury Bond Puzzle

We show that the price of a Treasury bond and an inflation-swapped TIPS issue exactly replicating the cash flows of the Treasury bond can differ by more than

Is the Volatility of the Market Price of Risk Due to Intermittent Portfolio Re-Balancing?

20 per

A Theory of Housing Collateral, Consumption Insurance and Risk Premia

100 notional. Treasury bonds are almost always overvalued relative to TIPS. Total TIPS-Treasury mispricing has exceeded

Evaluating Asset Pricing Models with Limited Commitment Using Household Consumption Data

56 billion, representing nearly eight percent of the total amount of TIPS outstanding. TIPS-Treasury mispricing is strongly related to supply factors such as Treasury debt issuance and the availability of collateral in the financial markets, and is correlated with other types of fixed-income arbitrages, These results pose a major puzzle to classical asset pricing theory. In addition, they raise the issue of why the Treasury issues TIPS, since in so doing it both gives up a valuable fiscal hedging option and leaves large amounts of money on the table.

Are Stocks Real Assets? Sticky Discount Rates in Stock Markets

Our paper examines whether the well-documented failure of unsophisticated investors to rebalance their portfolios can help to explain the enormous counter-cyclical volatility of aggregate risk compensation in financial markets. To answer this question, we set up a model in which CRRA-utility investors have heterogeneous trading technologies. In our model, a large mass of investors do not re-balance their portfolio shares in response to aggregate shocks, while a smaller mass of active investors adjust their portfolio each period to respond to changes in the investment opportunity set. We find that these intermittent re-balancers more than double the effect of aggregate shocks on the time variation in risk premia by forcing active traders to sell more shares in good times and buy more shares in bad times.