2023/01/22 by Mykola Pinchuk, Pinchuk, Mykola
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Corporate Finance and Governance #Econometrics (econ.EM) #FOS: Economics and business #Financial Markets and Investment Strategies #General Finance (q-fin.GN) #Monetary Policy and Economic Impact #Pricing of Securities (q-fin.PR) #Statistical Finance (q-fin.ST)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.09173
openalex publication_date 2023/01/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper explores asset pricing implications of unemployment risk from sectoral shifts. I proxy for this risk using cross-industry dispersion (CID), defined as a mean absolute deviation of returns of 49 industry portfolios. CID peaks during periods of accelerated sectoral reallocation and heightened uncertainty. I find that expected stock returns are related cross-sectionally to the sensitivities of returns to innovations in CID. Annualized returns of the stocks with high sensitivity to CID are 5.9% lower than the returns of the stocks with low sensitivity. Abnormal returns with respect to the best factor model are 3.5%, suggesting that common factors can not explain this return spread. Stocks with high sensitivity to CID are likely to be the stocks, which benefited from sectoral shifts. CID positively predicts unemployment through its long-term component, consistent with the hypothesis that CID is a proxy for unemployment risk from sectoral shifts.