Financial markets provide a natural quantitative lab for understanding some of the most advanced human behaviours. Among them is the invention and use of mathematical tools known as financial instruments. Besides money, the two most fundamental financial instruments are bonds and equities. More...

Frazzini and Pedersen (2014) document that a betting against beta strategy that takes long positions in low-beta stocks and short positions in high-beta stocks generates a large abnormal return of 6.6% per year and they attribute this phenomenon to funding liquidity risk. We demonstrate that...

I examine moment characteristics and predictability assumptions of dynamic asset pricing models. I propose a new measure --- the generalized entropy --- to summarize moment information of the multi-horizon pricing kernel for a dynamic model. Both static and dynamic strategy returns impose robust...

This paper reexamines the relation between various downside risk measures and future equity returns in a global context that spans 26 developed markets. We find that there is no significantly positive relation between systematic downside risk and the cross-section of equity returns, and in fact,...

Recent evidence indicates the value premium declined over time. In this paper, we argue this decline happened because book equity, BE, is no longer a good proxy for fundamental equity, FE, defined as the equity value originating purely from expected cash flows (i.e., no discount rate differences...

When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...

We explore how the demand for a risky asset can be decomposed into an investment effect and a hedging effect by all risk-averse investors. This question has been shown to be complex when considered outside of the mean-variance framework. We restrict dependence among returns on the risky assets...

We investigate the relative ability of two measures of the market implied cost of capital to predict aggregate equity market returns. One is Aggregate ICC, which is a weighted average of individual firms' ICC's. The other is ICC calculated using index information (Index ICC). Index ICC predicts...

We study asset prices and portfolio choice with overlapping generations, where the young disregard history to learn from own experience. Disregarding history implies less precise estimates of output growth, which in equilibrium leads the young to increase their investment in risky assets after...

We examine the puzzling negative relation between financial distress risk and the cross-section of expected returns. We find that the negative relation is most pronounced for up to six months after portfolio formation but after that, high distress stocks eventually earn persistently high...