Despite pension fund managers being largely unconstrained in their investment decisions, this paper reports evidence of clustering in the performance of a large cross-section of UK pension fund managers around the median fund manager. This finding is explained in terms of the predominance of a...

Convergence trades exploit temporary mispricing by simultaneously buying relatively underpriced assets and selling short relatively overpriced assets. This paper studies optimal convergence trades under both recurring and nonrecurring arbitrage opportunities represented by continuing and...

Forecast rationality under squared error loss implies various bounds on second moments of the data across forecast horizons. For example, the mean squared forecast error should be increasing in the horizon, and the mean squared forecast should be decreasing in the horizon. We propose rationality...

This paper explores the gains from combining expert forecasts from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). The analysis encompasses combinations based on principal components and trimmed means, performance-based weighting, and least squares estimates of optimal weights, as well as...

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro-variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance and that country-specific mutual funds provide...

We compare statistical and economic measures of forecasting performance across a large set of stock return prediction models with time-varying mean and volatility. We find that it is very common for models to produce higher out-of-sample mean squared forecast errors than a model assuming a...

This paper proposes a new method for combining forecasts based on complete subset regressions. For a given set of potential predictor variables we combine forecasts from all possible linear regression models that keep the number of predictors fixed. We explore how the choice of model complexity,...

We develop an unobserved-components approach to study surveys of forecasts containing multiple forecast horizons. Under the assumption that forecasters optimally update their beliefs about past, current, and future state variables as new information arrives, we use our model to extract...

This study examines evidence of structural breaks in models of predictable components in stock returns related to state variables such as the lagged dividend yield, Treasury bill rate, term spread and default premium. We examine a large set of size-and-industry-sorted profolios of US stocks as...

We develop a common factor approach to reconstruct new business cycle indices for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico ("LAC-4") from a new dataset spanning 135 years. We establish the robustness of our indices through extensive testing and use them to explore business cycle properties in...