It is well-known that the level of closed-end fund discounts appears to predict the corresponding fund's future returns. We further document that such predictability decays slowly. The popular explanations, including the tax effect, investor sentiment risk, and the funds's dividend yield, do not...

The traditional CAPM approach argues that only market risk should be incorporated into asset prices and command a risk premium. This result may not hold, however, if some investors can not hold the market portfolio. For example, if one group of investors fails to hold the market portfolio for...

Size, not book-to-market, helps to explain cross-sectional differences in Chinese stock returns from 1996 to 2002. Similar to the U.S. experience, beta does not account for return differences among individual stocks. Due to the speculative nature of Chinese capital markets and the low quality...

The dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese equity market provides a unique opportunity to examine market- and firm-specific risks over different market conditions. The price behavior of Japanese equities in the 1990s is found to resemble that of U.S. equities during the Great Depression. Both...

This paper uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period 1962-97 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly, correlations among individual stocks and...

Size, not book-to-market, helps to explain cross-sectional differences in Chinese stock returns from 1996 to 2002. Similar to the U.S. experience, beta does not account for return differences among individual stocks. Due to the speculative nature of Chinese capital markets and the low quality...

Small-return predictability in the stock market has been widely documented in empirical studies, yet little has been written on its economic importance. This paper examines the issue through profitability on a trading strategy that utilizes small levels of predictability and analyzes the...

The dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese equity market provides a unique opportunity to examine market-and firm-specific risks over different market conditions. The price behavior of Japanese equities in the 1990s is found to resemble that of U.S. equities during the Great Depression. Both...

This paper studies the behavior of idiosyncratic volatility for the post war period. Using aggregate idiosyncratic volatility statistics constructed from the Fama and French (1993) three-factor model, we find that the volatility of individual stocks appears to have increased over time. This...

This paper uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period 1962-97 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly correlations among individual stocks and...