Economists have long recognized that investors care differently about downside losses versus upside gains. Agents who place greater weight on downside risk demand additional compensation for holding stocks with high sensitivities to downside market movements. We show that the cross-section of...

Surveys do! We examine the forecasting power of four alternative methods of forecasting U.S. inflation out-of-sample: time series ARIMA models; regressions using real activity measures motivated from the Phillips curve; term structure models that include linear, non-linear, and arbitrage-free...

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) signals are an important part of factor-based investing strategies as they can stem from the same economic rationales as general factor premiums. Because factors are broad and diversified, building portfolios by jointly optimizing factor exposures with...

Today there are more active equity mutual funds and equity ETFs than individual stocks. Funds differ meaningfully in terms of individual stock holdings, and we examine the factor exposures of the typical fund and the cross section of holdings of different funds. We also examine the most common...

In the approximately 10,000 advisor portfolios that we analyze at the security level, we find there are large common patterns and significant exposures to just a few factors. Advisor portfolios are heavily exposed to economic growth, which is mostly accessed through equities, and could obtain...

Using data on 1,312 US equity active mutual funds with $3.9 trillion in AUM, we analyze the link between funds' “bottoms up” holdings-based environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) scores and funds' active returns, style factor loadings, and alphas. We find that funds with high ESG...

We document significant spreads in style factors — value, size, quality, momentum, and low volatility — in each of the style box categories. This is also true even for the value and small size factors, which are reflected in the original definition of the style box framework. Some single...

Recent studies suggest that the underperformance of IPOs in the post-1970 sample may be a small sample effect or %u201CPeso%u201D problem. That is, IPO underperformance may result from observing too few star performers ex-post than were expected ex-ante. We develop a model of IPO performance...

Build America Bonds (BABs) are a new form of municipal financing introduced in 2009. Investors in BAB municipal bonds receive interest payments that are taxable, but issuers receive a subsidy from the U.S. Treasury. The BAB program has succeeded in lowering the cost of funding for state and...

Hedge funds often impose lockups and notice periods to limit the ability of investors to withdraw capital. We model the investor's decision to withdraw capital as a real option and treat lockups and notice periods as exercise restrictions. Our methodology incorporates time-varying probabilities...