Financial markets have experienced unprecedented transformations, signs of which have emerged since the late 1970s. In recent years substantial consolidation occurred. In response to changes in macroeconomic variables, such as GDP, industrial production, inflation and the political business...

This paper provides evidence regarding the performance of momentum investment strategies that is consistent with neoclassical theory. More specifically, while momentum investment returns appear orthogonal to systematic risk in the extant literature, this paper illustrates that they due to...

We apply the concept of carry, which has been studied almost exclusively in currency markets, to any asset. A security's expected return is decomposed into its “carry” – an ex-ante and model-free characteristic – and its expected price appreciation. Carry predicts returns...

I document that the return expectations of Wall Street analysts are contrarian and countercyclical, contrasting with existing evidence that return expectations among Main Street investors (CFOs, retail investors) appear exclusively extrapolative and positively correlated. I demonstrate that an...

We show that firms' idiosyncratic volatility obeys a strong factor structure and that shocks to the common factor in idiosyncratic volatility (CIV) are priced. Stocks in the lowest CIV-beta quintile earn average returns 5.4% per year higher than those in the highest quintile. The CIV factor...

In rare disaster models, it is a major challenge to generate large equity premium and low risk-free rate by imposing realistic consumption jump size. This paper addresses this issue based on a dynamic general equilibrium production economy with learning about rare disasters. Essentially, the...

I study the interaction between lumpy investment and asset prices in both time-series and cross-section. To this end, I work with a variant of habit sensitivity function introduced in Campbell & Cochrane (1999). The model produces 100\% equity volatility of data by generating volatile marginal...

The Federal Reserve's 2009 program to purchase $300 billion of U.S. Treasury securities represented an unprecedented intervention in the Treasury market and provides a natural experiment with the potential to shed light on the price elasticities of Treasuries and theories of supply effects in...

The Federal Reserve's 2009 program to purchase $300 billion of U.S. Treasury securities represented an unprecedented intervention in the Treasury market and provides a natural experiment with the potential to shed light on the price elasticities of Treasuries and theories of supply effects in...

We test the predictability of eighteen stock return predictors, including classic factors such as firm size, book-to-market, and momentum, along with other proposed predictors from firm-specific, corporate investment, financing, and stock characteristic anomalies. These predictors have power to...