This paper uses data on actual returns on taxable bonds, tax-exempt bonds, and a small sample of equity mutual funds over the 1962-1998 period to compare two asset location strategies for retirement savers. The first strategy gives priority to holding equities, through equity mutual funds, in a...

This paper proposes an alternative to the traditional model for explaining the spread between taxable and tax-exempt bond yields. This alternative model is a special case of a general class of clientele models of portfolio choice and asset market equilibrium. In particular, we consider a setting...

This paper uses data from 1988 federal income tax returns, which asked taxpayers to report their tax-exempt interest income as an information item, to analyze the distribution of tax-exempt asset holdings. More than three quarters of the tax-exempt debt held by households was held by those with...

This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States. We assemble new data that links people to their sources of capital income and develop new methods to estimate the degree of return heterogeneity within asset classes. Disaggregated fixed income data reveal that...

Since 1980, foreign investors have timed their purchases and sales of U.S. Treasurys to yield particularly low returns. Their annual dollar-weighted returns, measured by IRRs, are around 3% lower than a buy-and-hold strategy over the same horizon. In comparison, the IRRs achieved by domestic...

This paper reviews the literature on idiosyncratic equity volatility since the publication of "Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk" in 2001. We respond to replication studies by Chiah, Gharghori, and Zhong and by Leippold and Svaton, and we...

We use micro data from Orbis on firm level balance sheets and income statements to document that accounting returns for privately held businesses are dispersed, persistent, and negatively correlated with firm equity. We also show that firms experience large, fat-tailed, and partly transitory...

The distributions of wealth in the US and many other countries are strikingly concentrated on the top and skewed to the right. To explain the income and wealth inequality, we provide a tractable heterogeneous-agent model with incomplete markets in continuous time. We separate illiquid capital...

Marketing and distribution expenses are responsible for about a third of the cost of active management in the mutual fund industry. We develop and estimate a structural model of mutual fund marketing with learning about unobserved skill and costly investor search. Our estimates suggest that...