This paper is concerned with empirical and theoretical basis of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). The paper begins with an overview of the statistical properties of asset returns at different frequencies (daily, weekly and monthly), and considers the evidence on return predictability, risk...

We examine the asymmetric impact of shocks to macroeconomic expectations and their underlying dispersion on equity risk premia across different market regimes. First, we rely on a two-state logit mixture vector autoregressive model and use Consensus Economics survey data on GDP growth,...

The term structure of equity returns is downward-sloping: stocks with high cash flow duration earn 1.10% per month lower returns than short-duration stocks in the cross section. I create a measure of cash flow duration at the firm level using balance sheet data to show this novel fact. Factor...

Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on aggregate stock market returns in narrow event windows around press releases by the Federal Open Market Committee. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct (demand) effect and an indirect...

Macroeconomic news announcements are elaborate and multi-dimensional. We consider a framework in which jumps in asset prices around macroeconomic news and monetary policy announcements reflect both the response to observed surprises in headline numbers and latent factors, reflecting other...

We propose a theory that jointly accounts for an asset illiquidity and for the asset price potential over-reliance on public information. We argue that, when trading frequencies differ across traders, asset prices reflect investors' Higher Order Expectations (HOEs) about the two factors that...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

Releases of key macroeconomic indicators are closely watched by financial markets. We investigate the role of expectation dispersion and economic uncertainty for the stock-market reaction to indicator releases. We find that the strength of the financial market response to news decreases with the...

This paper explores the effect of oil price fluctuations on the stock returns of U.S. oil firms using a strategy of identification through heteroskedasticity exploiting the 2020 oil crash. Results are twofold. First, we find that a decline in oil prices statistically significantly reduces stock...

We propose a nonparametric method to study which characteristics provide incremental information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...