Is Value Riskier than Growth?

Abstract

We study the risk of value and growth stocks. We find that time-varying risk goes in the right direction in explaining the value premium. Value betas tend to covary positively, and growth betas tend to covary negatively with the expected market risk premium. Our inference differs from that of previous studies because we sort conditional betas on the expected market risk premium, instead of on the realized market excess return. However, we also find that this beta-premium covariance is too small to explain the observed magnitude of the value premium within the conditional CAPM.