Contrary to what traditional asset pricing would imply, a strategy that bets against beta, by going long in low beta stocks and short in high beta stocks, tends to outperform the market. We consider a market in which diversity is maintained, i.e. no single stock can dominate the entire market,...

Many asset pricing theories treat the cross-section of returns volatility and correlations as two intimately related quantities driven by common factors, which hinders achieving a neat definition of a correlation premium. We formulate a model without factors, but with a continuum of securities...

We report strong evidence that changes of momentum, i.e. "acceleration", defined as the first difference of successive returns, provide better performance and higher explanatory power than momentum. The corresponding Γ-factor explains the momentum-sorted portfolios entirely but not the reverse....

We consider portfolio selection under nonparametric alpha-maxmin ambiguity in the neighbourhood of a reference distribution. We show strict concavity of the portfolio problem under ambiguity aversion.Implied demand functions are nondifferentiable, resemble observed bid-ask spreads, and are...

Given the competitiveness of a market-making environment, the ability to speedily quote option prices consistent with an ever-changing market environment is essential. Thus, the smallest acceleration or improvement over traditional pricing methods is crucial to avoid arbitrage. We propose a...

We analyse questions of arbitrage in fnancial markets in which asset prices change in time as stationary stochastic processes. The main focus of the paper is on a model where the price vectors are independent and identically distributed. In the framework of this model, we find conditions that...

We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely...

I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of exchange traded funds (ETFs) that accounts for the two-tier ETF market structure with both a centralized exchange (secondary market) and a creation/redemption mechanism (primary market) operating through market-making firms known as Authorized...

If regulation fails to differentiate between priced and idiosyncratic risk, it incentivizes investors to reach for yield. Studying securitization exposures on the balance sheets of German banks, I show evidence consistent with this prediction. Banks with tight regulatory constraints (low capital...