Studies of bond return predictability find a puzzling disparity between strong statistical evidence of return predictability and the failure to convert return forecasts into economic gains. We show that resolving this puzzle requires accounting for important features of bond return models such...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

Theoretical asset pricing models routinely assume that investors have heterogeneous information. We provide direct evidence of the importance of information asymmetry for asset prices and investor demands using plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of information caused by the closure or...

Our objective in this paper is to examine whether one can use option-implied information to improve mean-variance portfolio selection with a large number of stocks, and to document which aspects of option-implied information are most useful for improving the out-of-sample performance of...

We study the relationship between employee satisfaction and abnormal stock returns around the world, using lists of the “Best Companies to Work For” in 14 countries. We show that employee satisfaction is associated with positive abnormal returns in countries with high labor market...

Berkshire Hathaway has realized a Sharpe ratio of 0.76, higher than any other stock or mutual fund with a history of more than 30 years, and Berkshire has a significant alpha to traditional risk factors. However, we find that the alpha becomes insignificant when controlling for exposures to...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of hedge funds on asset markets. We construct a simple measure of the aggregate illiquidity of hedge fund portfolios, and show that it has strong in- and out-of-sample forecasting power for 72 portfolios of international equities, corporate...

We study the joint determination of fund managers' contracts and equilibrium asset prices. Because of agency frictions, investors make managers' fees more sensitive to performance and benchmark performance against a market index. This makes managers unwilling to deviate from the index and...

We develop a model of financially constrained arbitrage, and use it to study the dynamics of arbitrage capital, liquidity, and asset prices. Arbitrageurs exploit price discrepancies between assets traded in segmented markets, and in doing so provide liquidity to investors. A collateral...

Employing data from a new secondary market for hedge funds, this paper documents the existence of a closed-hedge fund premium, analogous to the closed-end mutual fund premium which has been extensively studied in the literature. Over the past decade, the two premia comove with one another at...