This paper evaluates persistence in the performance of institutional equity managers. We build on recent work on conditional performance evaluation, using time-varying conditional expected returns and risk measures. We find evidence that the investment performance of pension fund managers...

The literature has not unambiguously established that a positive alpha, as traditionally measured, means that an investor would want to buy a fund. However, when alpha is defined using the client's marginal utility function, a client faced with a positive alpha would generally want to buy. When...

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...

This paper makes indirect inference about the time-variation in expected stock returns by comparing unconditional sample variances to estimates of expected conditional variances. The evidence reveals more predictability as more information is used, and no evidence that predictability has...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This paper reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

This paper evaluates the ability of bond funds to "market time" nine common factors related to bond markets. Timing ability generates nonlinearity in fund returns as a function of common factors, but there are several non-timing-related sources of nonlinearity. Controlling for the...

This paper makes indirect inference about the time-variation in expected stock returns by comparing unconditional sample variances to estimates of expected conditional variances. The evidence reveals more predictability as more information is used, and no evidence that predictability has...

Previous studies have identified predetermined variables that have some power to explain the time series of stock and bond returns. This paper shows that loadings on the same variables also provide significant cross-sectional explanatory power for stock portfolio returns. These loadings are...

Mimicking portfolios have long been useful in asset pricing research. In most empirical applications, the portfolio weights are assumed to be fixed over time, while in theory they may be functions of the economic state. This paper derives and characterizes mimicking portfolios in the presence of...

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 Yule (1926) and Granger and Newbold (1974). Data mining for predictor variables interacts with spurious regression bias. The...