| Summary: | I study a novel data set of short-term dividend futures contracts for individual stocks. I combine this data with dividend forecasts from equity research analysts to construct a model-free measure of short-term dividend risk premia. My data on risk premia for cash flows at a specific horizon (one to two years) provide a more tractable setting for understanding the cross-sectional differences in asset pricing compared to standard equity returns, which mix risk premia for cash flows at infinitely many maturities. The first fact that emerges from my empirical analysis is a strong positive association between dividend risk and risk premia for short-maturity claims. This contrasts with well-known "low risk" anomalies for standard equity. Specifically, I find that firms with high dividend volatility have (i) higher risk premia, (ii) a strongly pro-cyclical slope in their term-structure of risk premia, and (iii) an inverse risk-return relation in realized stock returns. Lastly, I develop an asset-pricing model with heterogeneity in dividend volatility and time-varying market price of risk that explains my empirical results.
|
|---|
