The endeavor to understand bond returns and the term structure of interest rates has generated an extensive literature, ranging from papers on return predictability and affine term structure models to theoretical contributions in the form of equilibrium models. While most of the empirical...

We have reviewed Norges Bank's active management of the Government Pension Fund Global, referred to simply as the “Fund.”The absolute performance of the Fund is almost entirely determined by the benchmark choice set by the Ministry of Finance (the asset owner) and is dominated by equity...

The average firm going public or issuing new equity underperforms the market in the long run. This underperformance could be related to the endogeneity of the number of new issues, if new issues cluster after periods of high abnormal returns on new issues. In such a case, ex-post measures of new...

If investors are poorly protected, it is optimal for firms to be closely held because selling shares to minority shareholders is otherwise too expensive. Empirically, most firms in countries with poor investor protection are closely held so that investors cannot hold the market portfolio. We...

The largest asset managers in the world report their expectations publicly in so-called capital market assumptions. We collect these expectations and revisit the relationship between equity premium expectations and equity valuation ratios. Asset managers' equity premium expectations are high...

In periods of global stress there are large movements in exchange rates and assets prices. Currencies of developed economies appreciate, with the US dollar appreciating the most. Global stock markets fall, but the fall is smaller for the US market than other markets. Richer countries have...

We first discuss performance evaluation using stochastic discount factors and relate it to traditional mean-variance analysis. We then use Monte Carlo experiments to examine the properties of various general method of moment (GMM) estimators. The test statistics are fairly well behaved although...

The currency market features a relatively small cross-section and conditional expected returns can be characterized by only a few signals - interest differentials, trend, and mean-reversion. We exploit these properties to construct a conditional projection of the stochastic discount factor onto...

Traditional mean-variance efficient portfolios do not capture the potential wealth creation opportunities provided by predictability of asset returns. We propose a simple method for constructing optimally managed portfolios that exploits the possibility that asset returns are predictable. We...