We study the joint portfolio and information choice problem of institutional investors who are concerned about their performance relative to a benchmark. Benchmarking influences information choices through two distinct economic mechanisms. First, benchmarking reduces the number of shares in...

We study the impact of parameter uncertainty on the expected utility of a multiperiod investor subject to quadratic transaction costs. We characterize the utility loss associated with ignoring parameter uncertainty, and show that it is equal to the product between the single-period utility loss...

The decomposition of consumption beta into a component driven by assets' cash-flow news and one related to assets' discount-rate news reveals that macroeconomic risks embodied in cash flows largely account for the cross-sectional dynamics of average stock returns. Empirically, we find that...

Business cycle asymmetry is examined using annual observations on GDP for 22 economies over the period 1870 to 1994. The present paper extends recent research in a number of ways. First, a non-parametric testing procedure is adopted which is robust to outliers. Second, alternative methods of...

The recently examined durability-asymmetry hypothesis of Cook (1999) is re-evaluated using the diagnostic tests of time deformation proposed by Stock (1987, 1988). An application of these tests to disaggregated data on U.S. consumers' expenditure provides further support for this hypothesis,...

This paper proposes a novel test of zero pricing errors for the linear factor pricing model when the number of securities, N, can be large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. The test is based on Student t tests of individual securities and has a number of advantages over...

We merge the literature on downside return risk and liquidity risk and introduce the concept of extreme downside liquidity (EDL) risks. The cross-section of stock returns reflects a premium if a stock's return (liquidity) is lowest at the same time when the market liquidity (return) is lowest....

We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

Using properties of the cdf of a random variable defined as a saddle-type point of a real valued continuous stochastic process, we derive first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning w.r.t. a stochastic dominance relation. First, we define the concept of Markowitz...

In the context of modern portfolio theory, we compare the out-of-sample performance of 8 investment strategies which are based on statistical methods with the out-of-sample performance of a family of trivial strategies. A wide range of approaches is considered in this work, including the...