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...

Theoretical models imply fund size and performance should be negatively linked. However, empiricists have failed to uncover consistent support for this negative relation. Using a new econometric framework which includes fund-specific sensitivities to decreasing returns to scale, we find a both...

Both Kosowski et al. (2006) and Fama and French (2010) evaluate whether mutual funds outperform, but their conclusions are very different. We reconcile their findings. We show that the Fama and French method suffers from an undersampling problem that leads to a failure to reject the null...

Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

We analyze the results of the most recent survey of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) which looks ahead to the first quarter of 2006 and beyond. We present expectations of the equity risk premium measured over a 10-year horizon relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond. This multi-year survey...

We analyze the results of the September 2005 survey of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs). We present expectations of the equity risk premium measured over a 10-year horizon relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond. This multi-year survey has been conducted every quarter from June 2000 to...

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 expectations of the equity risk premium measured over a 10-year horizon relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond based on a survey of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs). This multi-year survey has been conducted each quarter from June 2000. Each quarter the survey also provides...

Based on a multi-year survey of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), we present expectations of the risk premium measured over a 10-year horizon relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond. Our survey also provides measures of the disagreement over the risk premium. We also provide a measure of...