We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model provides a “lookalike” Modigliani-Miller equation that predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is...

We study the term structure of variance swaps, equity and variance risk premia. A model-free analysis reveals a significant price jump component in variance swap rates. A model-based analysis shows that investors' willingness to ensure against volatility risk increases after a market drop. This...

This paper deals with identification and inference on the unobservable conditional factor space and its dimension in large unbalanced panels of asset returns. The model specification is nonparametric regarding the way the loadings vary in time as functions of common shocks and individual...

We develop a conditional factor model for the term structure of treasury bonds, which unifies non parametric curve estimation with cross-sectional asset pricing. Our factors correspond to the optimal non-parametric basis functions spanning the discount curve. They are investable portfolios...

We develop inferential tools for latent factor analysis in short panels. The pseudo maximum likelihood setting under a large cross-sectional dimension n and a fixed time series dimension T relies on a diagonal T x T covariance matrix of the errors without imposing sphericity or Gaussianity. We...