Download or read book Essays on Risk Appetite and Uncertainty written by Nancy R. Xu and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research contributes to an under-explored area in the consumption-based asset pricing literature: the dynamics of the ``amount of risk''. I then explore the asset pricing implications of this procyclical source of amount of risk in a consumption-based workhorse model that allows for time-varying risk aversion. In my joint paper with Geert Bekaert and Eric Engstrom, we develop a new measure of time-varying risk aversion that is consistent with a dynamic no-arbitrage asset pricing model, using a wide range of observed asset moments, macro and option data. In addition, our findings formally support the close relationship between variance risk premium and risk aversion (as suggested in the literature), and propose a financial proxy to economic uncertainty, which is a more significant predictor of future economic growth than VIX and true economic uncertainty.