A pre-specified set of nine prominent U.S. equity return anomalies produce significant alphas in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K. All of the anomalies are consistently significant across these five countries, whose developed stock markets afford the most extensive data. The anomalies...

We study tradeoffs among active mutual funds' characteristics. In both our equilibrium model and the data, funds with larger size, lower expense ratio, and higher turnover hold more-liquid portfolios. Portfolio liquidity, a concept introduced here, depends not only on the liquidity of the...

The Critical Finance Review commissioned Li, Novy-Marx, and Velikov (2017) and Pontiff and Singla (2019) to replicate the results in Pástor and Stambaugh (2003). Both studies successfully replicate our market-wide liquidity measure and find similar estimates of the liquidity risk premium. In...

A plot of expected returns versus betas obeys virtually no relation to an inefficient index portfolio's mean-variance location. If the index portfolio is inefficient, then the coefficients and R- squared from an ordinary-least-squares regression of expected returns on betas can equal essentially...

Short selling, as compared to purchasing, faces greater risks and other potential impediments. This arbitrage asymmetry explains the negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) and average return. The IVOL effect is negative among overpriced stocks but positive among underpriced...

Extremely long odds accompany the chance that spurious-regression bias accounts for investor sentiment's observed role in stock-return anomalies. We replace investor sentiment with a simulated persistent series in regressions reported by Stambaugh, Yu and Yuan (2012), who find higher long-short...

The standard regression approach to modeling return predictability seems too restrictive in one way but too lax in another. A predictive regression models expected returns as an exact linear function of a given set of predictors but does not exploit the likely economic property that innovations...

We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...

During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index-like investing. I develop an...

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,...