We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...

We develop a framework for estimating expected returns - a predictive system - that allows predictors to be imperfectly correlated with the conditional expected return. When predictors are imperfect, the estimated expected return depends on past returns in a manner that hinges on the correlation...