The principal explanations in the existing economics literature for the formation of concentrated markets are intellectual property-related entry barriers, economies of scale, and network effects. In each of these explanations, a few firms have an inherent advantage, allowing them to maintain...

From a database that is relatively free of bias, this article provides measures of the returns of hedge funds and of the distinctly nonnormal characteristics of the data. The results include risk-adjusted measures of performance and tests of the degree to which hedge funds live up to their claim...

One striking feature of the United States stock market is the tendency of days with very large movements of stock prices to be clustered together. We define an extreme movement in stock prices as one that can be characterized as a three sigma event; that is, a daily movement in the broad...

This paper demonstrates that the average investor would be better off by following a readily-implementable strategy of investing in a portfolio of the five largest active funds in U.S. equity, fixed income and international equity asset categories than investing in a corresponding portfolio of...

The typical discounted cash flow model used to value assets openly projects cash flows for an initial set of years and then typically assumes that the cash flows will grow at a constant rate into the indefinite future. In this paper, we discuss the implications for valuation and the discount...

Risk preferences and technology are jointly estimated in the nonlinear mean-standard deviation framework for a competitive firm model under price risk. A utility function is proposed that nests various risk preference structures and risk neutrality as empirically refutable special cases. The...