Implications of factor-based asset pricing models for estimation of expected returns and for portfolio selection are investigated. In the presence of model mispricing due to a missing risk factor, the mispricing and the residual covariance matrix are linked together. Imposing a strong form of...

The question of whether and how mutual fund managers provide valuable services for their clients motivates one of the largest literatures in finance. One candidate explanation is that funds process information about future asset values and use that information to invest in high-valued assets....

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the...

Many argue that home bias arises because home investors can predict home asset payoffs more accurately than foreigners can. But why doesn't global information access eliminate this asymmetry? We model investors, endowed with a small home information advantage, who choose what information to...

This paper attempts to assess whether money can generate persistent economic" fluctuations in dynamic general equilibrium models of the business cycle. We show that a small" nominal friction in the goods market can make the response of output to monetary shocks large" and persistent if it is...

We construct portfolios of stocks and of bonds that are maximally predictable with respect to a set of ex ante observable economic variables, and show that these levels of predictability are statistically significant, even after controlling for data-snooping biases. We disaggregate the sources...

We investigate the extent to which tests of financial asset pricing models may be biased by using properties of the data to construct the test statistics. Specifically, we focus on tests using returns to portfolios of common stock where portfolios are constructed by sorting on some empirically...

The profitability of contrarian investment strategies need not be the result of stock market overreaction. Even if returns on individual securities are temporally independent, portfolio strategies that attempt to exploit return reversals may still earn positive expected profits. This is due to...

In most sectors, technological progress boosts efficiency. But financial technology and the associated data-intensive trading strategies have been blamed for market inefficiency. A key cause for concern is that better technology might induce traders to extract other's information from order flow...