We analyze the relationship between economic uncertainty and commodity market volatility. We find that commodity market volatility comoves strongly with economic and financial uncertainty, especially during recessions. Variables associated with credit risk, financial market stress and fluctuations in business conditions bear significant predictive ability for commodity market volatility. The documented predictability is mainly observed in the period after the financialization of commodity markets (i.e. post-2004) and it peaks during the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.

Using a rich dataset of high frequency historical information from 2004 to 2013 we study the determinants of European sovereign bond returns over calm and crisis periods.We find that the sign of the equity beta crucially depends on country risk. In low risk countries, government bonds represent a natural hedge against equity risk as the equity beta is negative regardless of market conditions. On the other hand, government bonds of high risk countries lose their "safe-asset" status and exhibit more equity-like behaviour during the sovereign debt crisis, with positive and strongly significant co-movements relative to the stock market. Our estimates indicate that the equity beta switches from negative to positive when a sovereign's credit spread rises above 2%. We find that the decoupling of the government bond market between high risk and low risk countries implies that indiscriminate portfolio diversification does not pay. Instead, "prudent diversification" appears to offer superior risk adjusted returns in periods of sovereign stress and through the economic cycle. We find that the sign of the equity beta crucially depends on country risk. In low risk countries, government bonds represent a natural hedge against equity risk as the equity beta is negative regardless of market conditions. On the other hand, government bonds of high risk countries lose their "safe-asset" status and exhibit more equity-like behaviour during the sovereign debt crisis, with positive and strongly significant co-movements relative to the stock market. Our estimates indicate that the equity beta switches from negative to positive when a sovereign's credit spread rises above 2%. We find that the decoupling of the government bond market between high risk and low risk countries implies that indiscriminate portfolio diversification does not pay. Instead, "prudent diversification" appears to offer superior risk adjusted returns in periods of sovereign stress and through the economic cycle.JEL Classification: G01, G12, G15, E43

We exploit weekly options on the S&P 500 index to compute the weekly implied variance. We show that the weekly implied variance is a strong predictor of the weekly realized variance. In an encompassing regression test, it crowds out the information content of the monthly implied variance. Further tests reveal that the weekly implied variance outperforms not only the monthly implied variance but also well-established time series models of realized variance. This result holds both in-and out-of-sample and the forecast accuracy gains are significant.

We show that the dividend growth rate implied by the options market is informative about (i) the expected dividend growth rate and (ii) the expected dividend risk premium. We model the expected dividend risk premium and explore its implications for the predictability of dividend growth and stock market returns. Correcting for the expected dividend risk premium strengthens the evidence of dividend growth and stock market return predictability both in-and out-of-sample. Economically, a market timing investor who accounts for the time varying expected dividend risk premium realizes an additional utility gain of 2.02 % per year.