The existing replication policies at top finance journals are far weaker than the policies at top economics journals. This paper explores both the costs and benefits of having a stronger replication policy in the context of my failed 2010 initiative to develop a unified policy across all top...

Stock characteristics have two sources of predictive power. First, a characteristic might be valuable in identifying high or low expected returns across industries. Second, a characteristic might be useful in identifying individual stock expected returns within an industry. Past studies...

We provide some new tools to evaluate trading strategies. When it is known that many strategies and combinations of strategies have been tried, we need to adjust our evaluation method for these multiple tests. Sharpe Ratios and other statistics will be overstated. Our methods are simple to...

Over the past 30 years, there has been a striking evolution in fund management structure with team-managed funds growing from 30% of funds to over 70% today. While much attention is focused on fund performance, our paper presents evidence that this transformation is likely a response to...

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...

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...

Value investing, as defined by the Fama–French HML factor, has underperformed growth investing since 2007, producing a drawdown of 55% as of mid-2020. The underperformance leads many to argue that value is dead. Our analysis attributes value's recent underperformance to two sources: the HML...

Currently the real, inflation-adjusted, price of gold is almost as high as it was in January 1980 and August 2011. Since 1975, periods of high real gold prices have occurred during periods of elevated concern about high future price inflation. Five years after the real price peaks in January...

Given the cross-sectional and temporal variation in their liquidity, emerging equity markets provide an ideal setting to examine the impact of liquidity on expected returns. Our main liquidity measure is a transformation of the proportion of zero daily firm returns, averaged over the month. We...

Using a sample that post-dates important regulatory changes in Europe, we show that a buy recommendation from an analyst on a “consensus sell” stock is, on average, sufficient to cause the stock to start to rise in value. Similarly, a sell recommendation on a “consensus buy” stock can...