We construct daily real-time indices capturing the public information on realized and anticipated economic activity. The one-month change in realized fundamentals predicts U.S. stock returns across horizons with strongest results between a month and a quarter. The information in anticipated...

We examine empirically the response of bond returns and their volatility to good and bad macroeconomic news during expansions and recessions. We find that macroeconomic announcements are most important when they contain bad news for bond returns in expansions and, to a lesser extent, good news...

We propose an empirical implementation of the consumption-investment problem using the martingale representation alternative to dynamic programming. Our method is based on the direct observation of state prices from options data. This greatly simplifies the investor's task of specifying the...

We propose a novel approach to optimizing portfolios with large numbers of assets. We model directly the portfolio weight in each asset as a function of the asset's characteristics. The coefficients of this function are found by optimizing the investor's average utility of the portfolio's return...

We present a simulation-based method for solving discrete-time portfolio choice problems involving non-standard preferences, a large number of assets with arbitrary return distribution, and, most importantly, a large number of state variables with potentially path-dependent or non-stationary...

We extend range-based volatility estimation to the multivariate case. In particular, we propose a range-based covariance estimator motivated by a key financial economic consideration, the absence of arbitrage, in addition to statistical considerations. We show that this estimator is highly...

We model the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns as a latent vector autoregressive (VAR) process to study the contemporaneous and intertemporal relationship between expected returns and risk in a flexible statistical framework and without relying on exogenous predictors. We find a...