The estimation of expected security returns is one of the major tasks for the practical implementation of the Markowitz portfolio optimization. Against this background, in 1992 Black and Litterman developed an approach based on (theoretically established) expected equili-brium returns which...

The Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index purports to measure irrational investor sentiment, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is designed to largely reflect fundamentals. Removing this fundamental component from the Baker and Wurgler index creates an index of investor...

Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

In this paper, we document evidence that downside betas tend to comove more than upside betas during a financial crisis, but upside betas tend to comove more than the downside betas during financial booms. We find that the asymmetry between Downside-Beta Comovement and Upside-Beta Comovement is...

We examine the predictive effect of sentiment on the cross-section of stock returns across different economic states. The degree of mispricing and the subsequent price correction can be different between economic expansion and recession because of the limits of arbitrage and short sale...

This paper investigates whether realized and implied volatilities of individual stocks can predict the cross-sectional variation in expected returns. Although the levels of volatilities from the physical and risk-neutral distributions cannot predict future returns, there is a significant...

Stock markets proved to be statistically predictable on an economically interesting scale over the past decade by fully data driven automatically constructed maps that associate to a set of new factor values a return prediction that is the average of historically observed returns for an area in...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced — or has failed to influence — federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH...

In contrast to previous studies, we redefine the category of "rationality" from the perspective of investors' pursuit for wealth maximization. Using the data from Chinese stock market, this paper studies the impact of rational and irrational sentiment on asset returns from short-term to...

This paper studies the out-of-sample predictability of the monthly market as well as size, value, and momentum premiums. We use a sample from each the US and the Swiss stock market between 1989 and 2007. Our Swiss sample provides an important new perspective as the repeated evaluation of the...