This study investigates whether discount rate changes serve as an informative signal for investors to enter or exit the stock market. Based on the signal, a market timing strategy is formulated and its performance relative to a passive buy-and-hold strategy is tested with several performance...

This study investigates the cross-sectional variation in equity real estate investment trusts (EREITs) returns. A pooled cross-sectional, time-series approach is used as an alternative to the two-step Fama-MacBeth regression. With pooling, more powerful tests can be obtained from the limited...

We find that the 52-week high effect (George and Hwang, 2004) cannot be explained by risk factors. Instead, it is more consistent with investor underreaction caused by anchoring bias: the presumably more sophisticated institutional investors suffer less from this bias and buy (sell) stocks close...

We find the low volatility anomaly is present in all but the smallest of stocks. Portfolios can be formed on either total or idiosyncratic volatility to take advantage of this anomaly, but we show measures of idiosyncratic volatility are key. Standard risk-adjusted returns suggest that there is...

Using a sample of U.S. firms from 1995 to 2002, we examine corporate payout policy in dual-class firms. The expropriation hypothesis predicts that dual-class firms pay out less to shareholders because entrenched managers want to maximize the value of assets under control and the private benefits...

The top 5 percent of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds in 2012 had greater aggregate TNA than the remaining 95 percent of funds combined. This skewness in size has implications for mutual fund research: What is true of the average fund is not necessarily true of the average dollar. We...

The addition of the Fama and French (2015) profitability (RMW) and investment (CMA) factors to the standard four-factor model reveals persistent positive alpha after fees for mutual funds. Over the period 2000-2014, about 65 percent of fund managers have at least some skill, and about 15 percent...

To what extent conflicts of interest affect the investment value of sell-side analyst research is an ongoing debate. We approach this issue from a new direction by investigating how asset-management divisions of investment banks use stock recommendations issued by their own analysts. Based on...

We examine underpricing, long-run returns, lockup periods, and gross spreads for penny stock IPOs over the 1990-1998 period. We find that penny stock IPOs have higher initial returns than ordinary IPOs, but significantly worse long-run underperformance. We also find that penny stock IPOs have...