We explore the questions of whether and why Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) pay more for real estate than non-REIT buyers, consequently breaking the law of one price. We develop a model where REITs optimally pay more for property because (1) they are able, due to capital access advantages...

Previous research finds that fundamental macroeconomic news has little effect on stock prices. This study shows that after allowing for different stages of the business cycle, a stronger relationship between stock prices and news is evident. In particular, the empirical results suggest that the...

Long/short ratios like 130/30 are an increasingly common way for the investment management industry to describe portfolios that are released from the long-only constraint. The ratio of a portfolio's long and short positions to net notional value is often the primary description of the strategy,...

High market-wide returns make some investors overconfident because they incorrectly attribute the gains to their stock picking talents. Investors who are subject to biased self-attribution increase their trading in subsequent periods in models by Gervais and Odean (2001) and Odean (1998a). We...

Derivative securities and markets have experienced tremendous worldwide growth since 1970. But even so, they are not always well understood. To remedy this situation, the authors explain the link between options and futures and the underlying security or index from which they ultimately derive...

Price informativeness measures how and when information is aggregated into asset prices. We study the price informativeness of realized earnings growth for U.S. stocks with a focus on exposures to factors that have historically outperformed the market index. Our study includes the largest one...

Equity analysts conceptualize the Fama-French framework as a tool for studying the size and value characteristics of equity portfolios along with the market return. But the market return is not the return to market beta. In fact, commercial providers of equity risk models typically include both...

Active portfolio management is typically conducted within constraints that do not allow managers to fully exploit their ability to forecast returns. Constraints on short positions and turnover, for example, are fairly common and materially restrictive. Other constraints, such as market-cap and...

This paper is a light hearted version of our paper forthcoming in the Financial Analysts Journal. We investigate the popular Motley Fool Foolish Four portfolio as a case study in data mining--the practice of developing trading strategies by searching through databases for correlations and...