We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level. As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund׳s ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level,...

Compared with the market, value, or size factors, momentum has offered investors the highest Sharpe ratio. However, momentum has also had the worst crashes, making the strategy unappealing to investors who dislike negative skewness and kurtosis. We find that the risk of momentum is highly...

We study an economy populated by three groups of myopic agents: constrained agents subject to a portfolio constraint that limits their risk taking, unconstrained agents subject to a standard nonnegative wealth constraint, and arbitrageurs with access to a credit facility. Such credit is valuable...

We show that Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 futures are pulled toward the at-the-money strike price on days when serial options on the S&P 500 futures expire (pinning) and are pushed away from the cost-of-carry adjusted at-the-money strike price right before the expiration of options on the S&P 500...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index from 1897 to 2011, and we use the false discovery rate (FDR) as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more...

We develop an incomplete-markets q-theoretic model to study entrepreneurship dynamics. Precautionary motive, borrowing constraints, and capital illiquidity lead to underinvestment, conservative debt use, under-consumption, and less risky portfolio allocation. The endogenous liquid...

We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket asymmetric information model, equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests, firms in the...

Barberis and Shleifer (2003) argue that style investing generates momentum and reversals in style and individual asset returns, as well as comovement between individual assets and their styles. Consistent with these predictions, in some specifications, past style returns help explain future...

We show that political geography has a pervasive effect on the cross-section of stock returns. We collect election results over a 40-year period and use a political alignment index (PAI) of each state's leading politicians with the ruling (presidential) party to proxy for local firms’...

I estimate the effect of uncertainty on risky innovation using a panel of 11,417 manufacturing firms. I find that an increase in uncertainty has a large negative effect on the risky innovation of entrepreneurial firms, while it does not have any significant impact on other firms. This negative...