Campbell and Shiller’s “accounting identity” implies that the log dividend-price ratio (LDPR) predicts either returns or dividend growths, but neither is significantly predictable, a well-known puzzle. Existence of the long-term mean LDPR is an important assumption behind the accounting...

University donors can contribute to endowment to make a permanent impact, given that universities are committed to investment and spending policies that preserve capital. Unfortunately, practitioner's common criterion of spending less than the expected return on endowment is known not to be...

As in continuous time, the nontrading region (NTR) in a mean-variance model with fixed, proportional, and quadratic trading costs is a singleton only for pure quadratic costs. Utility loss from costs is approximately proportional at small cost levels, and approximately constant at large cost...

We extend Cass and Stiglitz's analysis of preference-based mutual fund separation. We provide a complete characterization of the general K-fund separation. We show that some instances of separation with many funds can be constructed by adding inverse marginal utility functions having separation...

Stephen A. Ross was one of the most influential scholars in the field of financial economics in the late twentieth century. Ross's work was central to several novel domains of economic inquiry. His contributions included the arbitrage pricing theory (APT), the risk-neutral pricing of contingent...

Tobin's q is often used to proxy for firm performance when studying the relation between corporate governance and firm performance. However, our theoretical and empirical analysis demonstrate that Tobin's q does not measure firm performance since underinvestment increases rather than decreases...

Hart proved the difficulty of deriving general comparative statics in portfolio weights. Instead, we derive new comparative statics for the distribution of payoffs: A is less risk averse than B iff A's payoff is always distributed as B's payoff plus a non-negative random variable plus...