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.1.3. Data and preliminary analysisMarket excess return is calculated as the aggregate stock return minus the short-term interest rate. Aggregate stock return is the simple return on the value-weighted CRSP index including dividends, and the short-term interest rate is the one-month Treasury bill rate. From now on, we denote by the excess return of stock i in month t and by the excess market return in month t. We also denote by ri,d and rm,d, the daily excess returns on day d, where Dt is the number of days in month t.For measuring average variance and skewness, we use daily firm-level returns for all common stocks with share codes 10 or 11 from the CRSP data set, including those listed on the NYSE, AMEX, and Nasdaq.4 For a given month, we use all stocks that have at least ten valid return observations for that month. We exclude the least liquid stocks (firms with an illiquidity measure in the highest 0.1% percentile) and the lowest-priced stocks (stocks with a price less than $1). The sample period ranges from August 1963 to December 2016, extending the sample of Bali et al. (2005) by 15 years.When daily data are available, a common way of calculating the monthly variance of stock i in month t is