Macroeconomic Determinants of Stock Market Returns, Volatility and Volatility Risk-Premia

This paper introduces a no-arbitrage framework to assess how macroeconomic factors help explain the risk-premium agents require to bear the risk of .uctuations in stock market volatility. We develop a model in which return volatility and volatility risk-premia are stochastic and derive no-arbitrage conditions linking volatility to macroeconomic factors. We estimate the model using data related to variance swaps, which are contracts with payo¤s indexed to nonparametric measures of realized volatility. We .nd that volatility risk-premia are strongly countercyclical, even more so than standard measures of return volatility.