The evidence in Fama and Bliss (1987) that forward interest rates forecast future spot interest rates for horizons beyond a year repeats in the out-of-sample 1986-2004 period. But the inference that this forecast power is due to mean reversion of the spot rate toward a constant expected value no...

Variables with strong marginal explanatory power in cross-section asset pricing regressions typically show less power to produce increments to average portfolio returns, for two reasons. (1) Adding an explanatory variable can attenuate the slopes in a regression. (2) Adding a variable with...

Average stock returns for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific increase with the book-to-market ratio (B/M) and profitability and are negatively related to investment. For Japan the relation between average returns and B/M is strong, but average returns show little relation to profitability...

Our goal is to develop insights about the max squared Sharpe ratio for model factors as a metric for ranking asset-pricing models. We consider nested and non-nested models. The nested models are the CAPM, the three-factor model of Fama and French (1993), the five-factor extension in Fama and...