Do higher moments risk premia compensate for macroeconomic risk? ∗ Ian Khrashchevskyi y Stockholm Business School Stockholm University, SE-106 91, Stockholm, Sweden Working paper First draft: December 12, 2017 This draft: January 15, 2019 EFM classification codes: 410, 420, 450, 330 ∗I thank Jarkko Peltom¨aki,Ai Jun Hou, Roman Kozhan, Anders Vilhelmsson, Pasquale Della Corte, Matti Suominen, Juhani Linnainmaa, Russ Wermers, Torben Andersen, Frederic Malherbe as well as participants of LaWa(Lancaster-Warwick) PhD workshop, WBS seminar series and Thalesians seminar series for helpful comments and suggestions. I am very grateful to Warwick Business School for hospitality during my visit yAuthor e-mail:
[email protected] 1 Do higher moments risk premia compensate for macroeconomic risk? Abstract In this paper I investigate whether the risk premia associated with higher moments such as variance, skewness and kurtosis bears compensation for macroeconomic risk. I introduce a new measure for kurtosis risk premia and show that the higher moment risk premia are related to macroeconomic risk. In particular, the results suggest that (i) different risk premia compensates for different macroeconomic risks; (ii) there is asymmetrical relationship with macroeconomic risks and (iii) the risk premia is driven by two common factors, which are related to VIX and financial constraints 2 Higher moment risk premia is the cost investors need to pay to get protection against variance, skewness or kurtosis. The rising demand for such protection got wide media coverage1 and is of a particular interest from academic perspective. On one hand, there is an evidence that it can be traded in the market and is time-varying (see for instance, Bollerslev, Tauchen, and Zhou (2009), Kozhan, Neuberger, and Schneider (2013) and Harris and Qiao (2017)).