NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Flight to Quality, Flight to Liquidity, and the Pricing of Risk

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Dimitri Vayanos

NBER Working Paper No. 10327
Issued in February 2004
NBER Program(s):   AP

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We propose a dynamic equilibrium model of a multi-asset market with stochastic volatility and transaction costs. Our key assumption is that investors are fund managers, subject to withdrawals when fund performance falls below a threshold. This generates a preference for liquidity that is time-varying and increasing with volatility. We show that during volatile times, assets' liquidity premia increase, investors become more risk averse, assets become more negatively correlated with volatility, assets' pairwise correlations can increase, and illiquid assets' market betas increase. Moreover, an unconditional CAPM can understate the risk of illiquid assets because these assets become riskier when investors are the most risk averse.

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