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 documents the share of investable wealth that middle-class U.S. investors hold in the stock market over their working lives. This share rises modestly early in life and falls significantly as people approach retirement. Prior to 2000, the average investor held less of their investable...

The vast majority of Individual Retirement Account contributions represent net new saving, based on evidence from the quarterly Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CES). The results are based on analysis of the relationship between IRA contributions and other financial asset saving. The data show...

For investors, gold is an asset without a yield that is attractive in times of low and negative real interest rates. Gold also has an embedded put option because investors can sell it to those who value its use as jewelry or as a productive input. This paper presents an approach for pricing gold...

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984-2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news into interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of...

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...

Measured as yield spreads against AAA corporate bonds, the convenience premium of agency MBS averages 47 basis points over 1995 - 2021, about half of the long-term-Treasury convenience premium. Both MBS convenience premium and issuance amount depend on mortgage rate negatively, consistent with a...

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...