The empirical pricing kernels estimated from index options are non-monotone (Rosenberg and Engle, 2002; Bakshi, Madan, and Panayotov, 2010) and the corresponding risk-aversion functions can be negative (Aït-Sahalia and Lo, 2000; Jackwerth, 2000). We show theoretically that these and several other...

This paper documents the tendency of mutual fund managers to follow analyst recommendation revisions when they trade stocks, and the impact of analyst revisioninduced mutual fund herds on stock prices. We find that mutual fund herds follow consensus revisions in analyst recommendations,...

We present a simple rational model to highlight the effect of investors' participation costs on the response of mutual fund flows to past fund performance. By incorporating participation costs into a model in which investors learn about managers' ability from past returns, we show that mutual...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>We examine proprietary research produced by buy-side analysts working for a large fund management company. We find that the buy-side research has investment value for a one-year horizon, and the analysts producing this research exhibit differential ability that tends to...</p>

Because sell-side analysts are dependent on institutional investors for performance ratings and trading commissions, we argue that analysts are less likely to succumb to investment banking or brokerage pressure in stocks highly visible to institutional investors. Examining a comprehensive sample...

When capital market is imperfect, an entrepreneur has to invest substantial personal funds to start a firm and has to bear large firm-specific risk. Furthermore, if a typical entrepreneur is risk averse, private equity should earn a premium for idiosyncratic risk. In this paper I explore the...