The Relationship between Risk and Expected Return in Europe

Revised: 2006-07

We employ MIDAS (Mixed Data Sampling) to study the risk-expected return trade-off in several European stock indices. Using MIDAS, we report that, in most indices, there is a significant and positive relationship between risk and expected return. This strongly contrasts with the result we obtain when we employ both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models for conditional variance. We also find that asymmetric specifications of the variance process within the MIDAS framework improve the relationship between risk and expected return. Finally, we introduce bivariate MIDAS and find some evidence of significant pricing of the hedging component for the intertemporal riskreturn trade-off.