Theories of herding behavior predict that only investors with sufficiently precise private information or those most overconfident will deviate from the crowd. Using portfolio holdings, this paper identifies contrarian funds as those pursuing distinctive investment strategies, i.e., as those...

I investigate the possibility of estimating expected return on a stock from a linear equation with known coefficients using only risk-neutral variance of return and reach a negative conclusion. The formula is not viable because: (i) its coefficients are indeterminate (unknown) and are not...

In imperfect capital markets, an entrepreneur has to invest substantial personal funds to start a private firm and is forced to bear large firm-specific risk. Furthermore, if the entrepreneur is risk averse, one would expect the private equity to earn a premium for idiosyncratic risk. In this...

This paper examines the macro-spanning hypothesis for bond returns in international markets. Based on a large panel of real-time macro variables that are not subject to revisions, wefind that global macro factors have predictive power for bond returns unspanned by yield factors.Furthermore, we...

Recent studies show that the consensus forecasts of professional forecasters and central bankers underreact to news relative to full-information rational expectations. However, can the treasury bond market anticipate such underreaction through information aggregation? To answer this question, we...