The largest commercial bank stocks, ranked by total size of the balance sheet, have significantly lower risk-adjusted returns than small- and medium-sized bank stocks, even though large banks are significantly more levered. We uncover a size factor in the component of bank returns that is...

We decompose the returns differential between U.S. portfolio claims and liabilities into the composition, return, and timing effects. Our most striking and robust finding is that foreigners exhibit poor timing when reallocating between bonds and equities within their U.S. portfolios. The poor...

We apply the method of constrained asset share estimation (CASE) to test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) of the stock market. This method allows conditional expected returns to vary in relatively unrestricted ways. The data estimate reasonably the price of risk, and, in some cases, the MVE...

This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, and 1995 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm...

A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...

Asset prices plunged between 2007 and 2010 but then rebounded from 2010 to 2013. The most telling finding is that median wealth plummeted by 44 percent over years 2007 to 2010, almost double the drop in housing prices. The inequality of net worth, after almost two decades of little movement, was...

Japanese stock returns are even more closely related to their book-to-market ratios than are their U.S. counterparts, and thus provide a good setting for testing whether the return premia associated with these characteristics arise because the characteristics are proxies for covariance with...