We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level: As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level,...

Building on the idea that precision of credit ratings matters for the efficiency of investors' portfolio decisions, the paper analyzes the equilibrium precision of ratings. Our analysis explains why ratings are noisy, exhibit rating inflation and vary across asset classes and over the economic...

I propose a tractable asset pricing model to study distressed firms' returns when agents dynamically learn about firm solvency and make optimal default decisions. As distressed firms' access to finance depends on investors' information quality, the future speed of learning critically affects...

In this paper we show that institutional participation in the U.S. stock market in recent decades has played an ever increasing role in explaining cross-sectional variation in stock market illiquidity. We first document trends in the growth of institutional stock ownership using the 13F...

Using the value that a mutual fund extracts from capital markets as the measure of skill, we find that the average mutual fund has used this skill to generate about $3.2 million per year. We document large cross-sectional differences in skill that persist for as long as 10 years. We further...

Euro-area sovereign bond and interbank interest rate spreads widened sharply in the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis and over the subsequent European Debt Crisis, greatly increasing financing costs. Such rate volatility could represent concerns over asset liquidity or issuer solvency. To...

Using asset prices I estimate the marginal value of capital in a dynamic stochastic economy under general assumptions about technology and preferences. The state-space measure of marginal q relies on the joint measurability of the value function, i.e. firm market value, and its underlying firm...

Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S., based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper revisits this conclusion by incorporating Social Security retirement benefits into measures of wealth...

Active mutual fund managers care about fund size, which is affected by common fund flows driven by macroeconomic shocks. Fund managers hedge against common flow shocks by tilting their portfolios toward low-flow-beta stocks. In equilibrium, common flow shocks earn a risk premium. A multi-factor...

Despite its importance implied in asset pricing and macroeconomic models, insurance against long-run volatility risk has received little empirical documentation regarding its demand, supply, or pricing. This paper bridges the gap. First, I show that households have directly purchased large...