Over the last decade foreign bond portfolio positions in US dollar assets have risen above the reciprocal US investor positions in foreign currencies. In periods of increased economic uncertainty, institutional investors hedge their international bond positions, which creates a net hedging...

This article analyzes the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of various hedge fund portfolio strategies. Similarly to Avramov et al. (2007), we find that, before accounting for the effect of liquidity risk, hedge fund portfolios that incorporate predictability in managerial skills...

We explore a novel survey on responsible investing by institutional investors around the world and match it to archival data on their equity portfolio holdings. We document that institutions that publicly commit to responsible investing exhibit better environmental, social, and governance (ESG)...

We construct a momentum factor that identifies cross-sectional winners and losers based on a weighting scheme that incorporates all the price data, over the entire lookback period, as opposed to only the first and last price points of the window. The weighting scheme is derived from the...

What do asset managers believe regarding the financial performance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment strategies? We address this question by exploring the relationship between fund managers’ co-ownership and portfolio ESG performance. Managers with more “skin in the...

We develop a model of investment, payout, and financing policies in which firms face uncertainty regarding their ability to raise funds and have to search for investors when in need of capital. We show that capital supply uncertainty leads firms to value financial slack and to adjust their...

We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean-variance allocation, a sighifiant cost would arise. The performance...

Between 1999 and 2007, WR Hambrecht has completed 19 IPOs in the U.S. using an auction mechanism. We analyze investor behavior and mechanism performance in these auctioned IPOs using detailed bidding data. The existence of some bids posted at high prices suggests that some investors (mostly...

We show that options written on stocks with low prices are over-priced. This effect is robust to a variety of tests, controlling for common stock- and option- risk characteristics, and to reasonable transaction costs. Natural experiments corroborate this finding; options tend to become...

Households tend to hold substantial amounts of non-financial assets in the form of inventory. Households can obtain significant financial returns from strategic shopping and optimally managing these inventories of consumer goods. In addition, they choose to maintain liquid savings – household...