This paper extends a growing body of research into the time-series properties of return and trading dynamics caused by direct information flow across investors. Our market setting has the virtue of extreme simplicity including atomistic investors, continuous trading, and a diversified asset...

We analyze a dynamic auction model in which competitive risk-averse traders optimally exploit their long-lived homogeneous private information regarding the value of an asset. The asset's terminal value depends on both the traders' initial signal and a sequence of zero-mean information shocks...

Of the hundreds of published asset pricing anomalies, few have been properly tested to determine if they are admissible as true risk factors. Anomalies need not be risk factors, but they are often deployed in subsequent empirical tests as if they are. I leverage the equivalence between the...

Building on insights from the economics of superstars, I develop an efficient method for estimating the skill of mutual fund managers. “Outliers” are helpful for distinguishing skill from luck in this framework — informative rather than spurious. Forecasted performance is dramatically...

Morningstar ratings are important determinants of fund flows. We derive the finite-sample distribution of the underlying Morningstar risk-adjusted return (MRAR) and show that it exhibits high variance and bias. High variance explains the observed low absolute persistence of Morningstar ratings....

We demonstrate that fund investors employ a heuristic benchmark model to estimate alphas and allocate capital. This can result in observational equivalence to CAPM driven investment decisions. The benchmark estimator trades off bias against precision, accommodating finite sample constraints. The...

We evaluate popular measures of hedge fund tail risk such as maximum drawdown (MDD) and worst one-period loss, and prove theoretically that realized tail risk is a downward-biased estimator of true tail risk. The bias can be almost 100% using a reasonable calibration. That is, true tail risk can...

We apply a number of forecasting models to Australian Government Bond yields. All methods rely solely on the history of yields. Consistent with findings from US Treasury data, we show that the simplest forecasting models across all maturities and forecasting horizons are also generally the best:...