The market for passive ETFs and passive ETF benchmarks has exploded in the past decade. ETF sponsors get index benchmarks from brand name index providers (e.g., S&P, Russell, MSCI), a large number of smaller providers, or internally. We find that benchmark and index provider characteristics are...

We study put option sales undertaken by corporations during their repurchase programs. Put sales' main theoretical motivation is market timing, providing an excellent framework for studying whether security issues reflect managers' ability to identify mispricing. Our evidence is that these bets...

Previous work shows that the growth rate of industrial production is a common macroeconomic risk factor in the cross-section of expected returns. We demonstrate the connection between momentum profits and shifts in factor loadings on this macroeconomic variable. Winners have temporarily higher...