This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that regression-discontinuity designs arrive at biased estimates when attributes related to outcomes predict heaping in the running variable. After showing that our usual diagnostics are poorly suited to identifying this type of problem, we...

We develop asset pricing models' implications for portfolio efficiency when there is conditioning information in the form of a set of lagged instruments. A model of expected returns identifies a portfolio that should be minimum variance efficient with respect to the conditioning information. Our...

Since Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) and Fama and MacBeth (1973), the two-pass cross-sectional regression (CSR) methodology has become the most popular approach for estimating and testing asset pricing models. Statistical inference with this method is typically conducted under the assumption...

We ask whether stock returns in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US are predictable by three instruments: the dividend yield, the earnings yield and the short rate. The predictability regression is suggested by a present value model with earnings growth, payout ratios and the short rate as...

Stocks with greater downside risk, which is measured by higher correlations conditional on downside moves of the market, have higher returns. After controlling for the market beta, the size effect and the book-to-market effect, the average rate of return on stocks with the greatest downside risk...

It is widely believed that correlations between international equity markets tend to increase in highly volatile bear markets. This has led some to doubt the benefits of international diversification. This article solves the dynamic portfolio choice problem of a US investor faced with a...

This paper develops mew robust inference procedures for analyzing the intraday return volatility patterns that constitute a focal point of much market microstructure theory. Our empirical analysis is motivated by the recent lifting of trading restrictions in the interbank foreign exchange (FX)...

its higher order moments, and in particular, its third moment the skewness of the price change distribution. Evidence on correlations between inflation and its moments goesback over thirty years, and was first used to reject the independence of relative price changes and inflation that is...