The well-documented abnormal long-run buy-and-hold returns to firms issuing equity in initial public offerings and seasoned equity offerings, firms bidding in mergers, and firms initiating dividends can be attributed to imperfect control-firm matching. In addition to firm size and market-to-book...

Investment performance depends on return measurement horizon. The percentage of U.S. equity mutual funds that outperform the SPY is 46.9% in monthly returns, 39.9% in annual returns, and 29.5% in full-sample (1991-2008) returns. Further, true alphas vary with return measurement horizon, and the...

We propose that fitted values from market-wide regressions of firm returns on lagged firm characteristics provide useful benchmarks for assessing whether average returns to certain stocks are abnormal. To illustrate, we study eight events where abnormal returns have been documented, including...

Kolari, Pynnonen, and Tuncez rely on simulation outcomes to criticize the normalization of firm characteristics employed by Bessembinder and Zhang (2013) to assess returns after major corporate events. However, their simulation outcomes simply verify that a non‐linear normalization is...

Alpha depends on return measurement horizon, both theoretically and empirically. We demonstrate how alphas depend on horizon, introduce a procedure to estimate long-return-horizon alphas from short-horizon returns, and find that among those mutual funds with positive alphas estimated from...