Investors tend to focus on harvesting the risk premiums offered by traditional asset classes when making their strategic investment decisions. Some recent papers, however, argue that investors should also consider various other premiums for possible inclusion in the strategic asset allocation....

In this study we evaluate the performance of actively managed equity mutual funds against a set of passively managed index funds. We find that the return spread between the best performing actively managed funds and a factor-mimicking portfolio of passive funds is positive and as large as 3 to 5...

I argue that delegated portfolio management can cause the equilibrium relation between CAPM beta and expected stock returns to become flat, instead of linearly positive, and propose an alternative to the widely used Fama and French (1993) 3-factor asset pricing model which incorporates this...

We explore the cross-section of factor returns using a sample of 150+ equity factors. Most factors exhibit a positive premium and a negative market beta in the long run. Factor themes with a clear positive beta, in particular low leverage and size, have no alpha after controlling for this beta...

This paper examines the exposures of low-volatility portfolios to various sources of systematic risk. Our analysis includes interest rate, implied volatility, liquidity, commodity, sentiment, macroeconomic, and climate risk factors. We find that low-volatility portfolios lower the exposure to...

This paper examines the performance of equity factor portfolios during the Quant Crisis of 2018-2020. We find that there was basically only one way to outperform during this period, namely by investing in the largest and most expensive growth stocks. Other factors were only effective to the...

We examine the impact of excluding sin stocks on expected portfolio risk and return. Exclusions involve risk relative to the market and peers. We show how this tracking error can be translated into an equivalent loss in expected return, which is negligible at low tracking error levels, but not...

We examine the performance characteristics of recently introduced thematic indices using standard asset pricing theory. We find that thematic indices generally have strong negative exposures towards the profitability and value factors, indicating that they hold growth stocks that invest now for...