Historically, commodity futures have had excess returns similar to those of equities. But what should we expect in the future? The usual risk factors are unable to explain the time-series variation in excess returns. In addition, our evidence suggests that commodity futures are an inconsistent,...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Price momentum strategies have historically generated high positive returns with little systematic risk. However, these strategies also experience infrequent but severe losses. During 13 of the 978 months in our 1929-2010 sample, losses to a US-equity momentum strategy exceed 20 percent per...

Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have high future returns while stocks with large increases in put implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have low future returns. Sorting stocks ranked into decile portfolios by past call...

We propose an empirical implementation of the consumption-investment problem using the martingale representation alternative to dynamic programming. Our method is based on the direct observation of state prices from options data. This greatly simplifies the investor's task of specifying the...

We construct an equally-weighted index of commodity futures monthly returns over the period between July of 1959 and March of 2004 in order to study simple properties of commodity futures as an asset class. Fully-collateralized commodity futures have historically offered the same return and...

This paper is no longer available on-line from the NBER. A revised version of the paper has been published as "Liability-Driven Investment with Downside Risk" in the Journal of Portfolio Management Fall 2013, Vol. 40, No. 1: pp. 71-87

American options on the S&P 500 index futures that violate the stochastic dominance bounds of Constantinides and Perrakis (2007) from 1983 to 2006 are identified as potentially profitable trades. Call bid prices more frequently violate their upper bound than put bid prices do, while violations...

This paper builds on the landmark contribution of Glosten (1994) by treating the determination of limit order supply schedules as an exercise in asset pricing theory with the possible sizes of incoming market orders as the value-relevant states of nature, yielding an analogue of the Fundamental...

As a consequence of optimal investment choices, firms' assets and growth options change in predictable ways. Using a dynamic model, we show that this imparts predictability to changes in a firm's systematic risk, and its expected return. Simulations show that the model simultaneously reproduces:...