A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...

Because successful human capital interventions often fail to scale or replicate, public investment decisions require understanding how program size, context, and implementation shape program effects. This paper uses two new randomized controlled trials of summer youth employment programs in...

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women's labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women's total hours worked fall by 9.8 percent, more than...

Optimal portfolios differ according to the length of time they are held without being rebalanced. For the case in which asset returns are identically and independently distributed, it has been shown that optimal portfolios become less diversified as the holding period lengthens.We show that the...

Momentum in individual stock returns emanates from momentum in factor returns. Most factors are positively autocorrelated: the average factor earns a monthly return of 1 basis point following a year of losses and 53 basis points following a positive year. Factor momentum explains all forms of...

In the finance literature, a common practice is to create factor-portfolios by sorting on characteristics (such as book-to-market, profitability or investment) associated with average returns. The goal of this exercise is to create a parsimonious set of factor-portfolios that explain the...

We jointly model the information choice and portfolio allocation problem of institutional investors who are concerned about their performance relative to a benchmark. Benchmarking increases an investor's effective risk-aversion, which reduces his willingness to speculate and, consequently, his...

This paper analyzes a novel data set of commodity futures prices over a long sample period starting in 1877, which allows us to shed new light on several important and controversial questions. We document that commodity futures returns (1) have been positive on average; (2) vary significantly...

Investment taxes have a substantial impact on the performance of taxable mutual fund investors. Mutual funds can reduce the tax burdens of their shareholders by avoiding securities that are heavily taxed and by avoiding realizing capital gains that trigger higher tax burdens to the funds'...

High volatility and high beta stocks tilt strongly to small, unprofitable, and growth firms. These tilts explain the poor absolute performance of the most aggressive stocks. In conjunction with the well documented inability of the Fama and French three-factor model to price small growth stocks,...