In this paper, we provide the asymptotic theory for the widely used Fama and MacBeth (1973) two-pass regression in the usual case of a large number of assets. We find that the convergence of the OLS two-pass estimator depends critically on the time series sample size in addition to the number of...

In this paper, we study investor sentiment in five major asset markets: stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, and housing. Based on Thomson Reuter's sentiment measures extracted from 235 news and social media sources, we find that each market is predicted by its own sentiment. Cross-markets,...

While existing asset pricing studies focus on macroeconomic variables to predict stock market risk premium, we find that an aggregate index of corporate activities has substantially greater predictive power both in- and out-of sample, and yields much greater economic gain for a mean-variance...

In this paper, we use a simple model to illustrate that the existence of a large, negative wealth shock and insufficient insurance against such a shock can potentially explain both the limited stock market participation puzzle and the low-consumption-high-savings puzzle that are widely...

The modern portfolio theory pioneered by Markowitz (1952) is widely used in practice and taught in MBA texts. DeMiguel, Garlappi and Uppal (2007), however, show that, due to estimation errors, existing theory-based portfolio strategies are not as good as we once thought, and the estimation...

Economic objectives are often ignored when estimating parameters, though the loss of doing so can be substantial. This paper proposes a way to allow Bayesian priors to reflect the objectives. Using monthly returns of the Fama-French 25 size and book-to-market portfolios and their three factors...

In this paper, we provide a model-free test for asymmetric correlations which suggest stocks tend to have greater correlations with the market when the market goes down than when it goes up. We also provide such tests for asymmetric betas and covariances. In addition, we evaluate the economic...

We provide the first comprehensive analysis of options-implied information for predicting the cross-section of stock returns by jointly examining extensive sets of firm and option characteristics. Using portfolio sorts and high-dimensional methods, we show that only few option characteristics...