This paper proposes a new measure of contagion as the coincidence of large left-tail events in the idiosyncratic disturbances of international stock returns after controlling for their exposure to a global factor. Episodes of bad contagion, especially those involving a large number of countries, are followed by a significant drop in international stock returns. This predictability pattern can be understood as an international transmission effect, as bad contagion only affects countries that did not experience tail events. In addition, the negative effect of bad contagion spills over to real growth, sovereign default risk, and financial stability indicators.

We provide new empirical evidence that world currency and U.S. stock variance risk premiums have nonredundant and significant predictive power for the appreciation rates of 22 with respect to the U.S. dollar, especially at the four-month and one-month horizons, respectively. The heterogeneous exposures of currencies to the currency variance risk premium are systematically rising along the line of inflation risk. We rationalize these findings in a consumption-based asset pricing model, with local consumption uncertainty and global inflation uncertainty characterized, respectively, by the stock and currency variance risk premiums.

We use the text of financial stability reports (FSRs) published by central banks to analyze the relation between the sentiment they convey and the financial cycle. We construct a dictionary tailored specifically to a financial stability context, which classifies words as positive or negative based on the sentiment they convey in FSRs. With this dictionary, we construct financial stability sentiment (FSS) indexes for thirty countries between 2005 and 2017. We find that central banks’ financial stability communications are mostly driven by developments in the banking sector. Moreover, the sentiment captured by the FSS index explains movements in financial cycle indicators related to credit, asset prices, systemic risk, and monetary policy rates. Finally, our results show that the sentiment in central banks’ communications is a useful predictor of banking crises—a one percentage point increase in FSS is followed by a twenty-nine percentage point increase in the probability of a crisis.

We find that an option-based equity tail risk factor is priced in the cross section of currency returns; more exposed currencies offer a low risk premium because they hedge against equity tail risk. A portfolio that buys currencies with high equity tail beta and shorts those with low beta extracts the global component in the tail factor. The estimated price of risk of this novel global factor is consistently negative in currency carry and momentum portfolios, and in portfolios of other asset classes, suggesting that excess returns of these strategies can be partially understood as compensations for global tail risk.

We develop a tractable equilibrium asset pricing model with cumulative prospect theory (CPT) preferences. Using GMM on a sample of U.S. equity index option returns, we show that by introducing a single common probability weighting parameter for both tails of the return distribution, the CPT model can simultaneously generate the otherwise puzzlingly low returns on both out-of-the-money put and out-of-the-money call options as well as the high observed variance premium. In a dynamic setting, probability weighting and time-varying equity return volatility combine to match the observed time-series pattern of the variance premium. Received May 30, 2017; editorial decision August 10, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of existing measures of uncertainty, risk, and volatility, noting their conceptual distinctions. It summarizes how they are constructed, their relative advantages in usage, and their effects on financial market and economic outcomes. The measures are divided into four categories based on the construction methodology: news-based, survey-based, econometric-based, and market-based measures. While heightened uncertainty is typically associated with negative real and financial outcomes, the magnitude of these effects and the interpretation of transmission channels crucially depend on identification considerations.