The paper argues that the market significantly overvalues firms with severely underfunded pension plans. These companies earn lower stock returns than firms with healthier pension plans for at least five years after the first emergence of the underfunding. The low returns are not explained by...

Brokers play a critical role in intermediating institutional transactions in the stock market. Despite the importance of brokers, we have limited information on what drives investors' choices among them. We develop and estimate an empirical model of broker choice that allows us to quantitatively...

We introduce a new dynamic trading strategy based on the systematic mispricing of U.S. companies sponsoring Defined Benefit pension plans. This portfolio produces an average return of 1.51% monthly between 1989 and 2004, with a Sharpe Ratio of 0.26. The returns of the strategy are not explained...

As a consequence of the recent bear stock market, the aggregate funding level of defined benefit pension plans has tremendously deteriorated. A relevant issue is whether the market value of the firms sponsoring these plans reflects their pension liabilities. In sharp contrast with earlier...

We complement the conditional CAPM by introducing unobservable long-run changes in risk factor loadings. In this environment, investors rationally 'learn' the long-level of factor loadings from the observation of realized returns. As a direct consequence of this assumption, conditional betas are...