Human capital contracts give private investors the right to share of students' future earnings in return for a financial contribution during their studies. Although still rarely used, human capital contracts could not only help to completement limited public funding for higher education but...

The components of GDP (residential investment, durables, nondurables, equipment and software, and business structures) display a pronounced lead-lag structure. We investigate the implications of this lead-lag structure for the cross-section of asset returns. We find that the leading GDP...

By choosing investment strategies that intentionally create exposure to factor betas, investors may be obtaining uncompensated risks. We show across a wide variety of factors and geographical markets that factors constructed from fundamental characteristics have earned high returns, whereas...

Factors in prominent asset pricing models are positively autocorrelated. We derive a transformation that turns an autocorrelated factor to a ``time-series efficient'' factor. Time-series efficient factors earn significantly higher Sharpe ratios than the original factors and contain all the...

Conventional wisdom, reflected in firm, investment bank, and court practice and the way academics teach corporate finance, suggests that the equity cost of capital varies considerably across firms. This practice builds on a vast amount of evidence on expected rate of return differences between...

In the four regions (North America, Europe, Japan, and Asia Pacific) we examine, there are value premiums in average stock returns that, except for Japan, decrease with size. Except for Japan, there is return momentum everywhere, and spreads in average momentum returns also decrease from smaller...

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of recently proposed asset pricing models which extend the standard preference specification by a reference level of consumption. We motivate an alternative model that accounts for the return on human capital as a determinant of the reference level....

We study the performance of conditional asset pricing models in explaining the German cross-section of stock returns. Our test assets are portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market as in the paper by Fama and French (1993). Our results show that the empirical performance of the Capital Asset...

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of recently proposed asset pricing models which extend the standard preference specification by a reference level of consumption. The novelty is that we use a broad cross-section of test assets, which provides a level playing field for a comparison to...

Average stock returns for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific increase with the book-to-market ratio (B/M) and profitability and are negatively related to investment. For Japan the relation between average returns and B/M is strong, but average returns show little relation to profitability...