We examine whether real-time return forecasts are valuable to an investor looking to allocate their portfolio across a wide selection of countries. We expand the Sum-of-Parts (SoP) method for forecasting stock returns to an international setup by adding FX returns as an additional component. We...

This paper examines to what extent the momentum spread ratio (MSR) can predict momentum profits. The momentum spread ratio as a potential proxy of investor underreaction can significantly predict the momentum, industry momentum, and residual momentum, especially after 1994, suggesting that...

We propose a belief-generating model from which we build a statistical measure of investor disagreement. We simulate differences in beliefs across investors by endowing them with different machine learning models for forecasting returns from the same set of inputs. We measure disagreement as the...

What is the probability of high inflation; how high, when? These questions are important to all investors since even the 2% level to which we are accustomed will cut an investor's portfolio by over 17% during a decade. This 2% level is the target of the Federal Reserve, along with near 0%...

The attention of investors (IA) has been at the centre of much debate and research in the last decades. We test the forecasting ability of the Google Search Volume Index (SVI), as proxy of and demand for information, in the context of M&As. We employ the Cox Proportional Hazard model to model...

We compare the performance of time-series (TS) and cross-sectional (CS) strategies based on past returns. While CS strategies are zero-net investment long/short strategies, TS strategies take on a time-varying net-long investment in risky assets. For individual stocks, the difference between the...

Cross-firm predictability among economically linked firms can arise when both firms exhibit own-momentum and their returns are contemporaneously correlated. We show that cross-firm predictability can last up to 10 years, which is hard to reconcile with an interpretation of slow information...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...