Christian Schlag about the Annual Meeting of the European Finance Association

The cross-sectional dispersion of growth volatility forecasts by professional forecasters has strong predictive power for future excess stock market returns. This is consistent with an equilibrium model featuring ambiguity about volatility.

There seems to be a revival of research on bonds and related instruments, presumably due to the persistent low interest rate regime. I had the impression that there were more papers on bonds than at previous EFA conferences.

The keynote speech by John Cochrane was actually more about monetary economics than about finance, which is probably an indication that these two fields will move closer together in the future (again maybe also due to the fact that central banks have a stronger and stronger impact on financial markets).

“Generalized Recovery” by Christian Skov Jensen, David Lando, and Lasse Heje Pedersen, because it represents a new and interesting view on the current hot topic “recovery”.

As usual: Who is moving to/leaving which university? Why is it that referees never seem to understand how great my paper actually is?

The fact that I have seen an increasing number of papers on bonds strengthens my motivation to look more closely into this field.