Financial analysts assume that the reliability of predictions derived from regression analysis improves with sample size. This is generally true because larger samples tend to produce less noisy results than smaller samples. But this is not always the case. Some observations are more relevant...

Investors have traditionally relied on mean-variance analysis to determine a portfolio’s optimal asset mix, but they have struggled to incorporate private equity into this framework because they do not know how to estimate its risk. The observed volatility of private equity returns is...

Factor investing has gained widespread acceptance among institutional investors. Some investors believe it is preferable to stratify the investment universe into factors to manage portfolio risk more effectively, while other investors focus on factors because they believe they yield risk...

Financial analysts typically estimate volatilities and correlations from monthly or higher frequency returns when determining the optimal composition of a portfolio. Although it is widely acknowledged that these measures are not necessarily stationary across samples, most analysts assume...

The Sharpe ratio is the most widely used metric for comparing performance across investment managers and strategies, and the information ratio is as commonly used to evaluate performance relative to a benchmark. Although it is widely recognized that non-linearities arising from the inclusion of...

Investors sometimes have strong convictions that a distinctive economic regime will prevail in the period ahead and therefore would like to form a portfolio that reflects the expected returns, standard deviations, and correlations of assets during such a regime. To do so, they typically isolate...

It is common practice to forecast social, political, and economic outcomes by polling people about their intentions. This approach is direct, but it can be unreliable in settings where it is hard to identify a representative sample, or where subjects have an incentive to conceal their true...

The authors model COVID infections and COVID deaths, both reported and implied, for the 50 U.S. states as well as the District of Columbia, and separately for a sample of 33 countries, as a function of pre-existing circumstances that citizens have no ability to control over the short term. These...

Many sophisticated investors rely on scenario analysis to select a portfolio. These investors define prospective economic scenarios, assign probabilities to them, translate the scenarios into expected asset class returns, and select the portfolio with the highest expected return or expected...

The authors introduce a new methodology for determining the relative importance of fiscal and monetary policy to promote growth and stabilize inflation. They apply this methodology to a panel of data that spans 66 years and 17 countries. Their analysis shows that, on average, monetary policy is...