This paper examines relational contracts (RCs) in the housing market that exist between lenders and appraisers. We document that 42% of appraisals are at or near the contract value, while only 7.5% are below the contract. We develop an RC model and test several predictions using a novel data set...

Using a measure of ex-ante expected returns based on analyst price targets, we find strong evidence that investors price both systematic (beta and co-skewness) and non-systematic (idiosyncratic volatility) risk when determining the appropriate rate of return on a security. We demonstrate that...

Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have high future returns while stocks with large increases in put implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have low future returns. Sorting stocks ranked into decile portfolios by past call...

We introduce a new, hybrid measure of stock return tail covariance risk, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigate its cross-sectional predictive power. Our key innovation is that this covariance is measured across the left tail states of the...

We find that a large portion of U.S. equity mutual funds almost second-order stochastically dominates the market portfolio. Consistent with the canonical definition of second-order stochastic dominance, both fund investors and managers reveal their preference for funds with a higher degree of...

We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decision-making and activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to maximize value, their actions...

We investigate whether time-series volatility in book-to-market (UNC) is priced in equity returns. UNC captures uncertainty about the current value of the firm's portfolio of assets-in-place and real options, and reflects changes in moneyness and uncertainty in the exercise of these options. UNC...

Despite the conventional wisdom that the equity and bond markets are segmented, the organizational structure of mutual fund families facilitates information integration between shareholders and creditors, and thus offsets frictions that cause cross-asset segmentation. We find that actively...

We quantify disagreement about the economy with ex-ante measures of divergence of opinion among economic forecasters and investigate if economic disagreement has a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. We find a significant disagreement premium of 7.2% per...

This paper shows that firm growth potential – representing a firm's yet-unexercised growth opportunities – is associated with option overpricing and low future delta-hedged option returns. We provide an explanation of this phenomenon based on the idea that retail investors exert buying...