Asset pricing and downside risk in the Australian share market

Abstract

As downside risk has been identified as a separate risk exposure to investors, we investigate whether downside beta and co-skewness exposure impact on the return to investors in Australian equities. Although considered as a developed market, the Australian Securities Exchange merits separate investigation, as it is small and concentrated on some sectors, when compared with the major developed markets. As realized returns are a proxy for expected returns, we separately examine conditional returns in upturn and downturn periods. We find that both downside risks are separately priced by investors, and that our results are unaffected by the inclusion of a range of company characteristics. We subsequently confirm that returns to each downside risk are not related. In robustness tests, we conclude that the return to downside risk cannot be explained by a size, a value, or a momentum premium. Although it also has explanatory power, the inclusion of a leverage factor also does not reduce the explanatory power of downside risk.