We study the asset allocation problem of an institutional investor (LP) that invests in stocks, bonds, and private equity (PE). PE investments are risky, illiquid, and long-term. The LP repeatedly commits capital to PE funds, and this capital is gradually called and eventually distributed back...

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...

We explain the size and the existence of the mutual fund industry by generalizing the standard competitive noisy rational expectations framework with endogenous information acquisition. Since informed agents optimally choose to open mutual funds in order to sell their private information, mutual...

Sell-side analysts change their stock recommendations when their valuations differ from the market's. These valuation differences can arise from either differences in earnings estimates or the non-earnings components of valuation methodologies. We find that recommendation changes motivated by...

Prior studies attribute the future excess return patterns of R&D firms to either compensation for increased risk from R&D or to mispricing by investors. We suggest a third explanation for the future excess returns of R&D firms. We show that neither the level of R&D investment nor the change in...

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...