This article examines the risk and return characteristics of U.S. mutual funds. We employ an equilibrium version of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and a principal-components-based statistical technique to identify performance benchmarks. We also consider the Capital Asset Pricing Model...

This paper quantifies the diversification potential of timberland investments in a mean-variance framework. The starting point is a broad set of benchmark assets represented by various indexes. Including publicly traded timberland investments from the US and Canada in the portfolio does not...

The slope of the portfolio return and consumption growth cospectrum contains predictive information about future real economic activity, future recession probabilities, the risk aversion coefficient, as well as future expected returns. Commonly used economic variables do not subsume the...

This paper adopts the methodology in Bali and Cakici (2008) in tracking the evolution of the relation between equity REITs' idiosyncratic risk and their cross-sectional expected returns between 1981 and 2010. In addition to the full sample period, we study this relation for (i) all sample REITs,...

Sénéchal proposes a new analytical framework—the empirical law of active management—to assess the breadth, or diversification, and the skill of a portfolio manager. The framework requires no assumptions regarding a manager’s asset return expectations or investment process. The framework...

This study documents that contrarian investment strategies offer superior returns because these strategies exploit investors' expectation errors. The underlying source of these expectation errors may be due to biases on analysts' earnings forecasts. We found both positive earnings surprises and...

In this study we consider two methods of returns based style analysis for classification of investment styles for a single asset class, US Diversified Equity Funds. We extend Sharpe's (1992) style Returns Based Style Analysis (RBSA) by forming style groups using cluster analysis and RBSA...

This paper considers a link between momentum profitability and firm ratings. Credit risks for naïve momentum strategies present a U-shaped pattern across momentum portfolios. Due to firms ratings containing valuable information and predicting the cross-sectional stock returns, firm ratings...