Do more active hedge fund managers generate higher returns than their less active peers? We attempt to answer this question. Using Kalman Filter techniques, we estimate the risk exposure dynamics of a large sample of live and dead equity long-short hedge funds. These estimates are then used to...

We build a parsimonious international asset pricing model in which deviations of government bond yields from a fitted yield curve of a country measure the tightness of investors' capital constraints. We compute these measures at daily frequency for six major markets and use them to test the...

We study empirical mean-variance optimization when the portfolio weights are restricted to be direct functions of underlying stock characteristics such as value and momentum. The closed-form solution to the portfolio weights estimator shows that the portfolio problem in this case reduces to a...

I study long-short portfolio strategies formed on seven different stock characteristics representing various measures of past returns, value, and size. Each individual characteristic results in a profitable portfolio strategy, but these single-characteristic strategies are all dominated by a...