We treat expenditures that create intangible assets as investments and instead of expensing them, we add them back to earnings when measuring the return on equity of firms while constructing the profitability factor in the Fama and French (2015) five factor model. The profitability factor we...

Money is debt that circulates with no questions asked. Stablecoins are a new form of private money that circulate with many questions asked. We show how stablecoins can maintain a constant price even though they face run risk and pay no interest. Stablecoin holders are indirectly compensated for...

A war-related factor model derived from textual analysis of media news reports explains the cross section of expected asset returns. Using a semi-supervised topic model to extract discourse topics from 7,000,000 New York Times stories spanning 160 years, the war factor predicts the cross section...

Using a semi-supervised topic model on 7,000,000 New York Times articles spanning 160 years, we test whether topics of media discourse predict future stock and bond market returns to test rational and behavioral hypotheses about market valuation of disaster risk. Focusing on media discourse...

The extant literature predicts market returns with "simple" models that use only a few parameters. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we theoretically prove that simple models severely understate return predictability compared to "complex" models in which the number of parameters exceeds the...

We theoretically characterize the behavior of machine learning asset pricing models. We prove that expected out-of-sample model performance--in terms of SDF Sharpe ratio and test asset pricing errors--is improving in model parameterization (or "complexity"). Our empirical findings verify the...

We present two valuation models that we use to account for the annual data on price per share and dividends per share for the CRSP Value-Weighted Index from 1929-2023. We show that it is a simple matter to account for these data based purely on a model of variation in the expected ratio of...

This paper begins by re-examining the spectral properties of several cyclically sensitive variables such as hours worked, unemployment and capacity utilization. For each of these series, we document the presence of an important peak in the spectral density at a periodicity of approximately 36-40...