This paper studies the pricing of volatility risk using the first-order conditions of a long-term equity investor who is content to hold the aggregate equity market instead of overweighting value stocks and other equity portfolios that are attractive to short-term investors. We show that a conservative long-term investor will avoid such overweights to hedge against two types of deterioration in investment opportunities: declining expected stock returns and increasing volatility. We present novel evidence that low-frequency movements in equity volatility, tied to the default spread, are priced in the cross section of stock returns.

Theory argues that career concerns (i.e., concerns about the impact of current performance on contemporaneous and future compensation) encourage managers to withhold bad news disclosure. However, empirical evidence regarding the extent to which a manager's career concerns are associated with a delay in bad news disclosure is limited. Across multiple proxies for career concerns, we find that the extent to which managers delay bad news is positively associated with their level of career concerns. Then, we hand-collect data on a compensation contract that firms use to reduce CEOs' career concerns (i.e., ex ante severance pay agreements). We find that if managers receive a sufficiently large payment in the event of dismissal, they no longer delay the disclosure of bad news. Overall, our findings support prior theoretical evidence that managers delay bad news disclosure due to career concerns and suggest a mechanism through which firms can mitigate the delay. JEL Classifications: M12; M41. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.