Since the after-fee returns of funds-of-funds are, on average, lower than hedge fund returns, it is easy to conclude that funds-of-funds do not add value compared to hedge funds. However, funds-of-funds should not be evaluated relative to hedge fund returns in publicly reported databases....

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...

We investigate the leverage of hedge funds in the time series and cross section. Hedge fund leverage is counter-cyclical to the leverage of listed financial intermediaries and decreases prior to the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007. Hedge fund leverage is lowest in early 2009 when the...

We estimate the effect of shifts in monetary policy using the term structure of interest rates. In our no-arbitrage model, the short rate follows a version of the Taylor (1993) rule where the coefficients on the output gap and inflation vary over time. The monetary policy loading on the output...

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1.31% per month, after controlling for world...

We characterize the joint dynamics of dividends, expected returns, stochastic volatility, and prices. In particular, with a given dividend process, one of the processes of the expected return, the stock volatility, or the price-dividend ratio fully determines the other two. For example, together...

A conditional one-factor model can account for the spread in the average returns of portfolios sorted by book-to-market ratios over the long run from 1926-2001. In contrast, earlier studies document strong evidence of a book-to-market effect using OLS regressions in the post-1963 sample....

We examine the pricing of aggregate volatility risk in the cross-section of stock returns. Consistent with theory, we find that stocks with high sensitivities to innovations in aggregate volatility have low average returns. In addition, we find that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility...

International equity returns are characterized by episodes of high volatility and unusually high correlations coinciding with bear markets. We develop models of asset returns that match these patterns and use them in asset allocation. First, the presence of regimes with different correlations...

While many studies document that the market risk premium is predictable and that betas are not constant, the dividend discount model ignores time-varying risk premiums and betas. We develop a model to consistently value cashflows with changing risk-free rates, predictable risk premiums and...