Recent papers have also argued that the relation between firms’ idiosyncratic skewness and subsequent return could be related to growth options. In Trigeorgis and Lambertides (2014) and Del Viva et al. (2017), growth options are significant determinants of idiosyncratic skewness because of the convexity of the payoff of real options. As investors are willing to pay a premium to benefit from the upside potential of the real options, firms with growth options are generally associated with low expected returns.2When investors have a preference both for systematic and individual skewness, the pricing kernel depends on all sources of risk, including individual innovations. A typical approach consists in writing the pricing kernel as linear in the underlying sources of risk (Aït-Sahalia, Lo, 1998, Bates, 2008, Christoffersen, Jacobs, Ornthanalai, 2012). In our context with quadratic terms, the expected market return would be driven by the following equation:(1)where and Rf,t denote the market return and the risk-free rate, and denote the market variance and market skewness at time conditional on the information available at time t, and denote the average variance and skewness, and wi, t is the relative market capitalization of firm i. The first two terms of the expression correspond to the three-moment CAPM of Kraus and Litzenberger (1976). The last two terms correspond to the contribution of the average firm-specific expected variance and skewness to the aggregate expected return. The magnitude and significance of the parameters associated with these various predictors in principle depend on investors’ preferences. Additional details on the model behind the predictive regression implied from Eq. (1) can be found in Technical Appendix Section A.1.