The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market-rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities-led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

Thanks to a combination of scientific advances and economic incentives, the development of therapeutics to treat rare or “orphan” diseases has grown dramatically in recent years. With the advent of FDA-approved gene therapies and the promise of gene editing, many experts believe we are at an...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...

This paper empirically describes how the risk premiums of size portfolios vary with macro-economic fluctuations in the price of risk at the portfolio formation dates, thereby explaining the lack of robustness involving the unconditional size premium: Only portfolios formed in "bad" states - with...

I find no evidence that partial least squares based on disaggregated book-to-market ratios produces a model of market premiums with persistently positive out-of-sample R2, as originally documented for market returns. This is consistent with time variation in predictability, for example, and does...

Tests of the conditional CAPM are often based on the joint (internally inconsistent) hypothesis that the stock portfolio used in the tests is the theoretical, mean-variance efficient, market portfolio. I derive a new test based exclusively on the theory in the conditional CAPM. According to this...

This paper theoretically reconciliates the several types of value premiums observed in cross-section with the use of aggregate scaled-price ratios - including "value spreads" - as price of risk proxies in time series. Prices in scaled-price ratios reflect risk premiums (and the price of risk),...

This paper offers theoretical, empirical, and simulated evidence that momentum regularities in asset prices are not anomalies. Within a general, frictionless, rational expectations, risk-based asset pricing framework, riskier assets tend to be in the loser portfolios after (large) increases in...