We study the effect of introducing a nonredundant derivative on the volatilities of the stock market return and the locally risk-free interest rate. Our analysis uses a standard, frictionless, full-information, dynamic, continuous-time, general-equilibrium, Lucas endowment economy in which there...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

We develop a dynamic general-equilibrium framework with multiple households and multiple risky assets to explain how less- and more-sophisticated households differ in their portfolio and wealth dynamics. Differences in sophistication are modeled via heterogeneous confidence about asset returns,...

We study whether investors can exploit serial dependence in stock returns to improve out-of-sample portfolio performance. We show that a vector-autoregressive (VAR) model captures stock return serial dependence in a statistically significant manner. Analytically, we demonstrate that, unlike...

Does the choice of weighting scheme used to form test portfolios influence inferences drawn from empirical tests of asset pricing? To answer this question we first show that, with monthly rebalancing, an equal-weighted portfolio outperforms a value-weighted portfolio in terms of total mean...