We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

We examine the connection between tail risk — as measured in Kelly and Jiang (2014) — and the cross-section of expected returns. In conditional predictive regression systems and vector-autoregressions of the market portfolio and the long- and shoresides of the Fama-French factor portfolios,...

We propose a nonparametric method to study which characteristics provide incremental information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...

We provide the first large-scale study of the performance of expected-return proxies (ERPs) internationally. Analyst-forecast-based ICCs are sparsely populated and not robustly associated with future returns. Earnings-model-forecast-based ICCs are well-populated, but are unreliable outside the...

We propose a nonparametric method to test which characteristics provide independent information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...

A flexible statistical approach for the analysis of time-varying dynamics of transaction data on financial markets is here applied to intra-day trading strategies. A local adaptive technique is used to successfully predict financial time series, i.e., the buyer and the seller-initiated trading...

We built the largest dataset of high-frequency exchange rates so far. Our sample covers the spot prices and order flows of 19 currency pairs over the last 15 years measured on Reuters and EBS at the thirty-second frequency. We show that common, price-based factors describe exchange rate dynamics...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understanding the financial crisis of 2007 - 8. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed indices is...

This paper empirically examines the theoretically ambivalent relationship between socially responsible investing (SRI) and stock performance. It extends the existing literature by considering both the US and the entire European stock markets as well as by using consistent world-wide corporate...

We investigate the predictability of both volatility and volume for a large sample of Japanese stocks. The particular emphasis of this paper is on assessing the performance of long memory time series models in comparison to their short-memory counterparts. Since long memory models should have a...