Whether risk aversion is time varying and countercyclical is central to modern asset pricing, yet evidence remains limited and is based mainly on experimental, survey, or aggregate stock market data. We provide individual-level evidence from 10 million Chinese auto insurance contracts from 2011 to 2017, estimating policyholders’ risk aversion from deductible choices. We find that risk aversion is time varying and countercyclical. The estimates are negatively related to lottery and stock trading, positively related to insurance sales and bond trading, and vary with psychological factors, including seasonal mood, “zodiac year,” and calendar events.

This paper examines whether mandatory ownership disclosure aligns incentives or distorts in-vestor beliefs. Using a sample of 1,436 Chinese equity-oriented mutual funds from 2012 to 2023,we find that higher managerial and senior ownership are significantly associated with larger in-flows, suggesting that investors treat ownership as a quality signal. However, we find no evidencethat ownership forecasts superior future returns or risk-adjusted alphas. Mechanism tests showthat the ownership-flow effect is much stronger in low-marketing funds and that managers increaseownership after weak flows, a countercyclical pattern inconsistent with overconfidence and consis-tent with strategic remedial signaling. Overall, ownership disclosure appears to operate primarilythrough investor perception rather than information about managerial ability, weakening the linkbetween capital allocation and true skill in the mutual fund industry.

The RMB exchange rate policy follows a “two-pillar” rule, with the market pillar reflecting foreign exchange market conditions and the basket pillar stabilizing the RMB index. This paper documents a clear pattern of regime-switching in the policy coefficients on the market pillar. And the regime-switching patterns are driven by macroeconomic variables, the intraday market condition as well as the news on trade conflicts. In a Markov-switching rational expectations model, we demonstrate that regime-switching rules expand the policy parameter’s space over which a unique equilibrium exists and the self-fulfilling depreciation is ruled out. Thus, this paper rationalizes the use of counter-cyclical factor— a policy tool proposed to stabilize the RMB exchange market.

Ghysels, Horan, and Moench (2017) show that extracting principal component (PC) factors from real time as opposed to revised macro variables substantially reduces their power in forecasting bond excess returns. In this paper, we propose a predictive principal component (PPC) approach to extract factors from information pertaining to expected bond excess returns contained in real time macro variables. In so doing, the new PPC factors remove common noises in real time data and exhibit significant bond return predictability. The inand out-of-sample R2s improve by more than 50% relative to the PC factors. Moreover, the forecasted bond excess returns are countercyclical, consistent with standard asset pricing models.

We analyze a general equilibrium exchange economy with a continuum of agents who have ``catching up with the Joneses'' preferences and differ only with respect to the curvature of their utility functions. While individual risk aversion does not change over time, dynamic re-distribution of wealth among the agents leads to countercyclical time variation in the Sharpe ratio of stock returns. We show that the level of stock prices is negatively related to both the conditional return volatility and the risk premium, as observed empirically. Therefore, our model also produces the correct sign for the slope coefficients in long-horizon predictive regressions. For comparison, otherwise similar representative agent economies with the same type of preferences exhibit counter-factual behavior of conditional moments of returns, i.e., a constant Sharpe ratio and procyclical risk premium and return volatility.