Previous studies identify predetermined variables that predict stock and bond returns through time. This paper shows that loadings on the same variables provide significant cross-sectional explanatory power for stock portfolio returns. The loadings are significant given the three factors...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>The literature has not established that a positive alpha, as traditionally measured, means that an investor would want to buy a fund. When alpha is defined using the client's utility function, a positive alpha generally means the client would want to buy. When markets are...</p>

Even though stock returns are not highly autocorrelated, there is a spurious regression bias in predictive regressions for stock returns related to the classic studies of <link rid="b49">Yule (1926)</link> and <link rid="b21">Granger and Newbold (1974)</link>. Data mining for predictor variables interacts with spurious regression bias. The...

We study the properties of unconditional minimum-variance portfolios in the presence of conditioning information. Such portfolios attain the smallest variance for a given mean among all possible portfolios formed using the conditioning information. We provide explicit solutions for "n" risky...

We propose a cross-sectional time-series model to assess the impact of market liberalizations in emerging equity markets on the cost of capital, volatility, beta, and correlation with world market returns. Liberalizations are defined by regulatory changes, the introduction of depositary receipts...

We propose an exogenous measure of a country's growth opportunities by interacting the country's local industry mix with global price to earnings ("PE") ratios. We find that these exogenous growth opportunities predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This...

If asset returns have systematic skewness, expected returns should include rewards for accepting this risk. We formalize this intuition with an asset pricing model that incorporates conditional skewness. Our results show that conditional skewness helps explain the cross-sectional variation of...