Department: Business.

The shape of the volatility smirk has significant cross-sectional predictive power for future equity returns. Stocks exhibiting the steepest smirks in their traded options underperform stocks with the least pronounced volatility smirks in their options by around 10.9% per year on a risk-adjusted...

We develop a systematic approach for evaluating asset pricing models based on the second Hansen-Jagannathan distance (HJD), which requires a good asset pricing model to not only have small pricing errors but also be arbitrage free. Our approach includes a specification test and a sequence of...

Using a large sample of hedge fund manager characteristics, we provide one of the first comprehensive studies on the impact of manager characteristics, such as education and career concern, on hedge fund performances. We document differential ability among hedge fund managers in generating...

Using a large sample of hedge fund manager characteristics, we provide one of the first comprehensive studies on the impact of manager characteristics, such as education and career concern, on hedge fund performances. We document differential ability among hedge fund managers in generating...

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1.31% per month, after controlling for world...

We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston-Rouwenhorst (1994) model. We then establish the...

We investigate the ability of several international asset pricing models to price the returns on 36 FTSE global industry portfolios. The models are the international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) the ICAPM with exchange risks, and global two-factor and three-factor Fama-French (1996, 1998)...

Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) have developed two measures of pricing errors for asset-pricing models: the maximum pricing error in all static portfolios of the test assets and the maximum pricing error in all contingent claims of the assets. In this paper, we develop simulation-based Bayesian...