This paper studies the predictability of ultra high-frequency stock returns and durations to relevant price, volume and transactions events, using machine learning methods. We find that, contrary to low frequency and long horizon returns, where predictability is rare and inconsistent,...

We survey the nascent literature on machine learning in the study of financial markets. We highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research. This survey is designed for both financial economists interested in grasping...

We propose a statistical model of differences in beliefs in which heterogeneous investors are represented as different machine learning model specifications. Each investor forms return forecasts from their own specific model using data inputs that are available to all investors. We measure...

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...

Missing data for return predictors is a common problem in cross sectional asset pricing. Most papers do not explicitly discuss how they deal with missing data but conventional treatments focus on the subset of firms with no missing data for any predictor or impute the unconditional mean. Both...

We find that procyclical stocks, whose returns comove with business cycles, earn higher average returns than countercyclical stocks. We use almost a three-quarter century of real GDP growth expectations from economists' surveys to determine forecasted economic states. This approach largely...

We study the impact of remote work on the commercial office sector. We document large shifts in lease revenues, office occupancy, lease renewal rates, lease durations, and market rents as firms shifted to remote work in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that the pandemic has had large...

After the Covid-shock in March 2020, stock prices declined abruptly, reflecting both the deterioration of investors' expectations of economic activity as well as the surge in aggregate risk aversion. In the following months however, whereas economic activity remained sluggish, equity markets...

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our...