Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have high future returns while stocks with large increases in put implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have low future returns. Sorting stocks ranked into decile portfolios by past call...

A conditional one-factor model can account for the spread in the average returns of portfolios sorted by book-to-market ratios over the long run from 1926-2001. In contrast, earlier studies document strong evidence of a book-to-market effect using OLS regressions in the post-1963 sample....

Recently much progress has been made in developing optimal portfolio choice models accomodating time-varying opportunity sets, but unless investors are unreasonably risk averse, optimal holdings include unreasonably large equity positions. One reason is that most studies assume investors behave...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over the twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample covering the last third of the twentieth century for fifteen countries. We find that demographic variables...

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1.31% per month, after controlling for world...

We study the inflation hedging ability of individual stocks. While the poor inflation hedging ability of the aggregate stock market has long been documented, there is considerable heterogeneity in how individual stock returns covary with inflation. Stocks with good inflation-hedging abilities...

Using nonparametric techniques, we develop a methodology for estimating conditional alphas and betas and long-run alphas and betas, which are the averages of conditional alphas and betas, respectively, across time. The tests can be performed for a single asset or jointly across portfolios. The...

Build America Bonds (BABs) are a new form of municipal financing introduced in 2009. Investors in BAB municipal bonds receive interest payments that are taxable, but issuers receive a subsidy from the U.S. Treasury. The BAB program has succeeded in lowering the cost of funding for state and...

Hedge funds often impose lockups and notice periods to limit the ability of investors to withdraw capital. We model the investor's decision to withdraw capital as a real option and treat lockups and notice periods as exercise restrictions. Our methodology incorporates time-varying probabilities...

Recent studies suggest that the underperformance of IPOs in the post-1970 sample may be a small sample effect or %u201CPeso%u201D problem. That is, IPO underperformance may result from observing too few star performers ex-post than were expected ex-ante. We develop a model of IPO performance...