The Missing Risk Premium
by Unknown
Buy on AmazonRisk is the deviation from the consensus rather than an exposure to a covariance, and this implies there is no risk premium in general. It also implies that when there are a large number of people buying highly volatile assets, such assets will have negative returns in equilibrium. As there are several independent motivations for people to buy highly volatile assets, intuitively risky assets generally have lower-than-average returns. This novel conception of risk implies many things more consistent with the data than the current theory. Risk taking is an important life skill, so understanding its nature is important, and unfortunately academics who study it full-time are like so many other experts: when not irrelevant, 180 degrees wrong.…