Over the last couple of decades unprecedented increases in life expectancy have raised important concerns for retirement savings. We solve a life-cycle model with longevity risk, which can be hedged through endogenous saving and retirement decisions. We investigate the benefits of financial...

This paper considers the term structure of interest rates implied by a production-based asset pricing model in which the fundamental drivers are investment in equipment and structures as well as inflation. The model matches the average yield curve up to five-year maturity almost perfectly....

This paper presents a robust new finding that delta-hedged equity option return decreases monotonically with an increase in the idiosyncratic volatility of the underlying stock. This result cannot be explained by standard risk factors. It is distinct from existing anomalies in the stock market...

Research from psychology suggests that people evaluate fluent stimuli more favorably than similar information that is harder to process. Consistent with fluency affecting investment decisions, we find that companies with short, easy to pronounce names have higher breadth of ownership, greater...

We argue that the empirical evidence against the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) based on stock returns does not invalidate its use for estimating the cost of capital for projects in making capital budgeting decisions. Because stocks are backed not only by projects in place, but also by the...

Hedge fund managers trade off the benefits of leveraging on the alpha-generating strategy against the costs of inefficient fund liquidation. In contrast to the standard risk-seeking intuition, even with a constant-return-to-scale alpha-generating strategy, a risk-neutral manager becomes...

Theoretically, the implied cost of capital (ICC) is a good proxy for time-varying expected returns. We find that aggregate ICC strongly predicts future excess market returns at horizons ranging from one month to four years. This predictive power persists even in the presence of popular valuation...

Fama and French (2006) use the dividend-discount model to develop the role of expected profitability, expected investment, and the book-to-market ratio as predictors of stock returns. One reported empirical result is anomalous. The valuation model establishes that the comparative static relation...

We show how to price the time series and cross section of the term structure of interest rates using a three-step linear regression approach. Our method allows computationally fast estimation of term structure models with a large number of pricing factors. We present specification tests favoring...

This paper investigates whether risks associated with time-varying arrival of jumps and their effect on the dynamics of higher moments of returns are priced in the conditional mean of daily market excess returns. We find that jumps and jump dynamics are significantly related to the market equity...