In the four regions (North America, Europe, Japan, and Asia Pacific) we examine, there are value premiums in average stock returns that, except for Japan, decrease with size. Except for Japan, there is return momentum everywhere, and spreads in average momentum returns also decrease from smaller...

Value premiums, which we define as value portfolio returns in excess of market portfolio returns, are on average much lower in the second half of the July 1963-June 2019 period. But the high volatility of monthly premiums prevents us from rejecting the hypothesis that expected premiums are the...

Federal, state, and local governments are similar to nonprofits in that their labor inputs pay taxes, but they are otherwise tax exempt. Governments are involved in some activities special to them, for example, defense, police, and court systems, but many government activities overlap with those...

Political candidates on the left commonly propose an annual tax on wealth. There are lots of difficult questions associated with a wealth tax. For example, what counts as wealth and how is it measured? I put these important issues aside to focus on three simpler but central issues. (i) Since the...

Government does lots of redistribution along with expenditures for defense, education, etc. Government imposes income taxes to finance these activities. Income taxation can be done to raise revenue in a simple transparent way. Here's a suggested scheme

Tests of asset-pricing models commonly use either the cross-section regression approach of Fama and MacBeth (1973) or the time-series regression approach that centers on the GRS test of Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken (1989). The goal here is to discuss how the two approaches differ and their...

A five-factor model that adds profitability (RMW) and investment (CMA) factors to the three-factor model of Fama and French (1993) suggests a shared story for several average-return anomalies. Specifically, positive exposures to RMW and CMA (returns that behave like those of the stocks of...

Average stock returns for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific increase with the book-to-market ratio (B/M) and profitability and are negatively related to investment. For Japan the relation between average returns and B/M is strong, but average returns show little relation to profitability...

Our goal is to develop insights about the max squared Sharpe ratio for model factors as a metric for ranking asset-pricing models. We consider nested and non-nested models. The nested models are the CAPM, the three-factor model of Fama and French (1993), the five-factor extension in Fama and...

A five-factor model directed at capturing the size, value, profitability, and investment patterns in average stock returns performs better than the three-factor model of Fama and French (FF 1993). The five-factor model's main problem is its failure to capture the low average returns on small...