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Econometrica Vol. 86 No. 4 2018

Risk Preferences and the Macroeconomic Announcement Premium

Hengjie Ai; Ravi Bansal

Abstract

This paper develops a revealed preference theory for the equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre‐scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium. We provide a characterization theorem for the set of intertemporal preferences that generates a nonnegative announcement premium. Our theory establishes that the announcement premium identifies a significant deviation from time‐separable expected utility and provides asset‐market‐based evidence for a large class of non‐expected utility models. We also provide conditions under which asset prices may rise prior to some macroeconomic announcements and exhibit a pre‐announcement drift.

DOI
10.3982/ecta14607
Volume
86
Issue
4
Pages
1383-1430
Language
en
Sources
crossref openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib

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