We use industry valuation differentials across European countries to study the impact of membership in the European Union as well as the Eurozone on economic and financial integration. In integrated markets, discount rates and expected growth opportunities should be similar within one industry,...

We propose a novel theory that brings to light three fundamental performance drivers of zero-cost systematic investment strategies: (1) high (positive) own-asset signal-return predictability; (2) low (or negative) cross-asset signal correlation; and (3) low (or negative) cross-asset...

We document and quantify the negative impact of trend breaks (i.e., turning points in the trajectory of asset prices) on the performance of standard monthly trend-following strategies across several assets and asset classes. In the years of the U.S. economy’s expansion following the global...

Single factor asset pricing models face two major hurdles: the problematic time-series properties of the ex ante market risk premium and the inability of the risk measure to account for a substantial degree of the cross-sectional variation of expected excess returns. We provide an explanation...

A large body of academic research describes the optimal decisions that corporations should make, given certain assumptions and conditions. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that the way that corporations actually make decisions is not always consistent with the academic decision rules. In...

We present a framework for modeling and estimating dynamics of variance and skewness from time-series data using a maximum likelihood approach assuming that the errors from the mean have a non-central conditional t distribution. We parameterize conditional variance and conditional skewness in an...

The multiple testing problem plagues many important issues in finance such as fund and factor selection. Many look good purely by luck. There are a number of statistical techniques to control for multiplicity that reduce Type I errors - but it is unknown by how much. We propose a new way to...

Final working paper version. "" Published version: The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 31, Issue 7, July 2018, pp. 2499–2552. Past fund performance does a poor job of predicting future outcomes. The reason is noise. Using a random effects framework, we reduce the noise by pooling...

Identifying the factors that drive the cross-section of expected returns is challenging for at least three reasons. First, the choice of testing approach (time-series versus cross-sectional) will deliver different sets of factors. Second, varying test portfolio sorts changes the importance of...

Over the past 30 years, there has been a striking evolution in fund management structure with team-managed funds growing from 30% of funds to over 70% today. While much attention is focused on fund performance, our paper presents evidence that this transformation is likely a response to...