Abstract
While time-varying disasters can explain many characteristics of financial markets, their quantitative assessment is still missing. We propose a latent variable approach to estimate the time-varying probability of a macroeconomic disaster, using a dataset of 42 countries over more than 100 years. We find that disaster risk is volatile and persistent, strongly correlates with the dividend yield, and forecasts stock returns. A state-of-the-art model calibrated with our disaster risk estimates generates a large and volatile equity premium and a low risk free rate under standard assumptions. This evidence supports the idea that investors' fear of disasters drives equity premium dynamics.
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