This paper examines the question: Does regulatory approval of prospectuses act as a “certification” of securities offerings? Rational investors should generally ignore prospectus approval due to its being uninformative regarding either the quality of, or motives for, the underlying offering....

Standard factor models imply a linear relationship between expected returns on assets and their factor exposures. We provide the asymptotic properties of factor-model-based expected return estimators for individual assets and show that exploiting this linear relationship leads to precision gains...