I test whether asset prices reflect risk exposures of financial intermediaries in a setting well-suited to tackling concerns about omitted risk factors. I analyze catastrophe bonds whose cash flows are linked to natural disasters and find that 71% of the security-level variation in expected returns can be explained by a theoretically motivated measure of intermediaries’ marginal utility. Assuming natural disasters are independent of aggregate wealth, this result is inconsistent with any alternative explanation based on unobserved macroeconomic risks. In addition, the aggregate premium decreases and becomes less sensitive to the occurrence of disasters when intermediaries’ access to outside capital improves.

We show that an increase in a stock’s breadth of institutional ownership or turnover is followed by a significant, but temporary, increase in its CAPM beta estimate and a decrease in its CAPM alpha. The increasing effect of breadth of ownership on beta estimates is mainly driven by short-term investors. These transitory trading-activity-driven components of beta estimates contribute to the empirical failure of the CAPM and the large returns to long-short portfolios that bet against beta. Relations between ownership breadth, turnover, and betas, which we document, help explain the puzzling fact that, on average, betas increase after seasoned equity offerings and stock splits and decrease after stock repurchases.Received November 26, 2015; editorial decision February 17, 2017 by Editor Jeffrey Pontiff.