Extremely long odds accompany the chance that spurious-regression bias accounts for investor sentiment's observed role in stock-return anomalies. We replace investor sentiment with a simulated persistent series in regressions reported by Stambaugh, Yu and Yuan (2012), who find higher long-short...

According to conventional wisdom, annualized volatility of stock returns is lower when computed over long horizons than over short horizons, due to mean reversion induced by return predictability. In contrast, we find that stocks are substantially more volatile over long horizons from an...

We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...

This study explores the role of investor sentiment in a broad set of anomalies in cross-sectional stock returns. We consider a setting where the presence of market-wide sentiment is combined with the argument that overpricing should be more prevalent than underpricing, due to short-sale...

A plot of expected returns versus betas obeys virtually no relation to an inefficient index portfolio's mean-variance location. If the index portfolio is inefficient, then the coefficients and R- squared from an ordinary-least-squares regression of expected returns on betas can equal essentially...

Short selling, as compared to purchasing, faces greater risks and other potential impediments. This arbitrage asymmetry explains the negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) and average return. The IVOL effect is negative among overpriced stocks but positive among underpriced...

The standard regression approach to modeling return predictability seems too restrictive in one way but too lax in another. A predictive regression models expected returns as an exact linear function of a given set of predictors but does not exploit the likely economic property that innovations...

A representative-agent model with time-varying moments of consumption growth is used to analyze implications about means and volatilities of asset returns as well as the predictability of asset returns for various investment horizons. A comparative-statics analysis using non-expected-utility...

Despite powerful advances in yield curve modeling in the last twenty years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the key practical problem of forecasting the yield curve. In this paper we do so. We use neither the no-arbitrage approach, which focuses on accurately fitting the cross...

We extend range-based volatility estimation to the multivariate case. In particular, we propose a range-based covariance estimator motivated by a key financial economic consideration, the absence of arbitrage, in addition to statistical considerations. We show that this estimator is highly...