To shed light on the empirical relevance of the limits to arbitrage, we study hedge funds’ trading patterns in the stock market during liquidity crises. Consistent with arbitrageurs’ limited ability to provide liquidity, we find that at the time of liquidity crises hedge funds reduce their...

This is the first study to show evidence of liquidity risk in private equity returns.Our data contains cash flows for 4,403 liquidated investments, which are both successfuland unsuccessful, reducing sample selection bias to a minimum. We find that a onestandarddeviation positive shock in...

This paper explores the theoretical and empirical implications of time-varying and unobservable beta. Investors infer factor loadings from the history of returns via the Kalman filter. Due to learning, the history of beta matters. Even though the conditional CAPM holds, standard OLS tests can...

This paper finds that the market betas of value and small stocks have decreased by about 75% in the second half of the twentieth century. The decline in beta can be related to a long-term improvement in economic conditions that made these companies less risky.