I was invited by the editors to contribute a professional autobiography to the Annual Review of Financial Economics. I focus on what I think is my best stuff. Readers interested in the rest can download my vita from the Web site of the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. I only...

Recently evidence has come forth which suggests that empirical probability distributions of returns on securities conform better to stable Paretian distributions with infinite variances than to the normal distribution. Using a generalized form of a technique proposed by Sharpe [17] in a recent...

We estimate the internal rates of return earned by nonfinancial firms on (i) the initial market values of their securities and (ii) the cost of their investments. The return on value is an estimate of the overall corporate cost of capital. The estimate of the real cost of capital for 1950-96 is...

The anomalous returns associated with net stock issues, accruals, and momentum are pervasive; they show up in all size groups (micro, small, and big) in cross-section regressions, and they are also strong in sorts, at least in the extremes. The asset growth and profitability anomalies are less...

A five-factor model directed at capturing the size, value, profitability, and investment patterns in average stock returns performs better than the three-factor model of Fama and French (FF, 1993). The five-factor model׳s main problem is its failure to capture the low average returns on small...

The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) of William Sharpe (1964) and John Lintner (1965) marks the birth of asset pricing theory (resulting in a Nobel Prize for Sharpe in 1990). Before their breakthrough, there were no asset pricing models built from first principles about the nature of tastes...