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...

This study explores multivariate methods for investment analysis based on a sample of return histories that differ in length across assets. The longer histories provide greater information about moments of returns, not only for the longer-history assets, but for the shorter-history assets as...

Greater skill of active investment managers can mean less fee revenue in a general equilibrium. Although more-skilled managers earn more revenue than less-skilled managers, greater skill for active managers overall can imply less revenue for their industry. Greater skill allows managers to...

We quantify the U.S. corporate sector's carbon externality by computing the sector's "carbon burden"--the present value of social costs of its future carbon emissions. Our baseline estimate of the carbon burden is 131% of total corporate equity value. Among individual firms, 77% have carbon...

We review the literature on sustainable investing, focusing on financial effects. First, we examine the effects of investor tastes on portfolio tilts and asset prices in a simple equilibrium setting. We establish novel connections, including a direct relation between the green portfolio tilt and...

A four-factor model with two "mispricing" factors, in addition to market and size factors, accommodates a large set of anomalies better than notable four- and five-factor alternative models. Moreover, our size factor reveals a small-firm premium nearly twice usual estimates. The mispricing...

We model optimal fund turnover in the presence of time-varying profit opportunities. Our model predicts a positive relation between an active fund's turnover and its subsequent benchmark-adjusted return. We find such a relation for equity mutual funds. This time-series relation between turnover...

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,...

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...