We investigate the leverage of hedge funds in the time series and cross section. Hedge fund leverage is counter-cyclical to the leverage of listed financial intermediaries and decreases prior to the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007. Hedge fund leverage is lowest in early 2009 when the...

We estimate the effect of shifts in monetary policy using the term structure of interest rates. In our no-arbitrage model, the short rate follows a version of the Taylor (1993) rule where the coefficients on the output gap and inflation vary over time. The monetary policy loading on the output...

In 2001, a small group of academics and practitioners met to discuss the equity risk premium (ERP). Ten years later, in 2011, a similar discussion took place, with participants writing up their thoughts for this volume. The result is a rich set of papers that practitioners may find useful in...

We harvest factors—broad and persistent sources of returns—in US core fixed income in three ways. First, we take strategic over and underweight positions in certain macro factors. While strategic overweights to rates, or duration, and credit factors have historically resulted in...

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...

We present a model of optimal allocation over liquid and illiquid assets, where illiquidity is the restriction that an asset cannot be traded for intervals of uncertain duration. Illiquidity leads to increased and state-dependent risk aversion, and reduces the allocation to both liquid and...

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...