Over-the-counter (OTC) stocks are far less liquid, disclose less information, and exhibit lower institutional holdings than listed stocks. We exploit these different market conditions to test theories of cross-sectional return premiums. Compared to premiums in listed markets, the OTC illiquidity...

Asset owners (principals) typically do not manage their own investments and leave this job to delegated managers (agents). What is best for the asset owner, however, is usually not best for the fund manager. Additional agency conflicts arise when the asset owner does not know the quality and...

Using a transaction cost model, and an assumption for the smart beta premium observed in data, we estimate the capacity of a particular implementation of momentum, quality, value, size, minimum volatility, and a multi-factor combination. For a given trading horizon, we can find the fund size...

The benchmarks of a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) should take into account the economic and political context behind the creation of the SWF and the role the SWF plays as one part of a government's overall policy. The first benchmark of legitimacy ensures that the capital of the SWF is not...

Today there are more active equity mutual funds and equity ETFs than individual stocks. Funds differ meaningfully in terms of individual stock holdings, and we examine the factor exposures of the typical fund and the cross section of holdings of different funds. We also examine the most common...

Using data on 1,312 US equity active mutual funds with $3.9 trillion in AUM, we analyze the link between funds' “bottoms up” holdings-based environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) scores and funds' active returns, style factor loadings, and alphas. We find that funds with high ESG...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over the whole twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample covering the last third of the twentieth century for fifteen countries. We find that demographic...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over the whole twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample covering the last third of the twentieth century for fifteen countries. We find that demographic...

This paper is no longer available on-line from the NBER. A revised version of the paper has been published as "Searching for a Common Factor in Public and Private Real Estate Returns" in the Journal of Portfolio Management JPM RE 2013, Vol. 39, No. 5: pp. 120-133.

Municipal bonds are often "advance refunded." Bonds that are not yet callable are defeased by creating a trust that pays the interest up to the call date, and pays the call price. New debt, generally at lower interest rates, is issued to fund the trust. Issuing new securities generally has zero...