In this paper we exploit a fundamental difference between positive and negative rare events to explain the value premium. We show that if booms are expected but do not occur, average in-sample returns will be lower for assets that are exposed to booms than for those that are not. We build a...

The equity premium, namely the expected return on the aggregate stock market less the government bill rate, is of central importance to the portfolio allocation of individuals, to the investment decisions of firms, and to model calibration and testing. This quantity is usually estimated from the...

Recent work suggests that the consumption disaster-based explanation of the equity premium is inconsistent with the average implied volatilities from option data. We resolve this inconsistency in a model with stochastic disaster risk (SDR). The SDR model explains average implied volatilities,...

We test whether fund managers have stock-picking skill by comparing their holdings and trades prior to earnings announcements with the returns realized at those events. This approach largely avoids the joint-hypothesis problem with long-horizon studies of fund performance. Consistent with...

Are excess returns predictable and if so, what does this mean for investors? Previous literature has tended toward two polar viewpoints: that predictability is useful only if the statistical evidence for it is incontrovertible, or that predictability should affect portfolio choice, even if the...