An ongoing debate sets capital budgeting against market timing. The primary difficulty in evaluating these theories is finding distinct exogenous proxies for investment opportunities and mispricing. We use demand shifts induced by demographics to address this problem, and hence, provide a more...

We estimate the risk and expected returns of private equity investments based on the market prices of exchange-traded funds of funds that invest in unlisted private equity funds. Our results indicate that the market expects unlisted private equity funds to earn abnormal returns of approximately...

If actively managed mutual funds suffer from diminishing returns to scale, funds should alter investment behavior as assets under management increase. Although asset growth has little effect on the behavior of the typical fund, we find that large funds and small-cap funds diversify their...

If the Roll critique is important, changes in the variance of the stock market may be only weakly related to changes in aggregate risk and subsequent stock market excess returns. However, since individual stock returns share a common sensitivity to true market return shocks, higher aggregate...

An ongoing debate in corporate finance pits capital budgeting-equity and debt issuance are dictated by investment opportunities -against market timing-equity issuance exploits market mis-valuation. A difficulty in evaluating these theories is finding exogenous proxies for investment...

Do firms release news in response to investor inattention? We consider news about earnings and analyze the response of returns to announcements on Friday and other weekdays. Friday announcements have less immediate and more delayed response. The delayed response as a percentage of the total...

Do investors pay enough attention to long-term fundamentals? We consider the case of demographic information. Cohort size fluctuations produce forecastable demand changes for age-sensitive sectors, such as toys, bicycles, beer, life insurance, and nursing homes. These demand changes are...

Market returns and industry performance are predicted by forecastable oil price movements. Although predictability can be compatible with market efficiency, these results may be more readily explained by underreaction to information about subsequent oil price changes. Some market participants...

Do firms time the release of news in response to investor inattention? We consider news about earnings and analyze the reaction of investors to announcements on Friday and on other weekdays. The day of the week for the announcement has two main effects on stock returns. First, the short-term...

Recent research argues that uncertainty about future stock borrowing fees is an impediment to short-selling and it explains the risk-adjusted performance of short strategies. One possible mechanism is that borrowing fee risk carries a risk premium. Since the present value of the uncertain...