Building on neoclassical reasoning, we propose a new multi-factor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity. The neo- classical three-factor model outperforms traditional factor models in explaining the average returns across...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

Using a large panel of firms across the world from 1991-2006, we show that the median foreign firm has lower idiosyncratic risk than a comparable U.S. firm. Country characteristics help explain variation in the level of idiosyncratic risk, but less so than firm characteristics. Idiosyncratic...

During the week of August 6, 2007, a number of quantitative long/short equity hedge funds experienced unprecedented losses. It has been hypothesized that a coordinated deleveraging of similarly constructed portfolios caused this temporary dislocation in the market. Using the simulated returns of...

Adding a return factor based on capital investment into standard, calendar-time factor regressions makes underperformance following seasoned equity offerings largely insignificant and reduces its magnitude by 37-46%. The reason is that issuers invest more than nonissuers matched on size and...

Recent studies suggest that the underperformance of IPOs in the post-1970 sample may be a small sample effect or %u201CPeso%u201D problem. That is, IPO underperformance may result from observing too few star performers ex-post than were expected ex-ante. We develop a model of IPO performance...

A key result of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that the market portfolio---the portfolio of all assets in which each asset's weight is proportional to its total market capitalization---lies on the mean-variance efficient frontier, the set of portfolios having mean-variance...

A number of studies claim that aggregate managerial decision variables, such as aggregate equity issuance, have power to predict stock or bond market returns. Recent research argues that these results may be driven by an aggregate time-series version of Schultz's (2003) pseudo market timing...

The monthly volatility of IPO initial returns is substantial, fluctuates dramatically over time, and is considerably larger during "hot" IPO markets. Consistent with IPO theory, the volatility of initial returns is higher among firms whose value is more difficult to estimate, i.e., among firms...