We model the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns as a latent vector autoregressive (VAR) process to study the contemporaneous and intertemporal relationship between expected returns and risk in a flexible statistical framework and without relying on exogenous predictors. We find a...

Stock prices are more informative when the information has less social value. Speculators with limited resources making costly (private) information production decisions must decide to produce information about some firms and not others. We show that producing and trading on private information...

In this paper we examine the portfolios of more than 40,000 equity investment accounts from a large discount brokerage during a six year period (1991-96) in recent U.S. capital market history. Using the historical performance for the equities in these accounts, we find that a vast majority of...