Macroeconomic Announcement Premium

The paper reviews the evidence on the macroeconomic announcement premium and its implications on equilibrium asset pricing models. Empirically, a large fraction of the equity market risk premium is realized on a small number of trading days with significant macroeconomic announcements. We review the literature that demonstrates that the existence of the macroeconomic announcement premium implies that investors’ preferences must satisfy generalized risk sensitivity. We show how this conclusion generalizes to environments with heterogeneous investors and demonstrate how incorporating generalized risk sensitivity affects economic analysis in dynamic setups with uncertainty.