An economic tracking portfolio is a portfolio of assets with returns that track an economic variable. Monthly returns on stocks and bonds are useful in forecasting post-war US output, consumption, labor income, inflation, stock returns, bond returns, and Treasury bill returns. These forecasting...

We test whether the impact of financial constraints on firm value is observable in assetquot; returns. We form portfolios of firms based on observable characteristics related to financialquot; constraints, and test for common covariation in the stock returns of these firms. Using severalquot;...

We provide a model of closed-end fund pricing which includes investors who do not form expectations correctly and allows for salient country-specific news to affect this expectation formation process. We use panel data on prices and net asset values of closed- end country funds to examine...

We examine the reaction of daily bond prices to the release of government macroeconomic news. These news releases are of interest because they are released on periodic, preannounced dates and because they cause substantial bond market volatility. The news component of volatility is not...

On average, stock prices rise around scheduled earnings announcement dates. We show that this earnings announcement premium is large, robust, and strongly related to the fact that volume surges around announcement dates. Stocks with high past announcement period volume earn the highest...

I count the number of times per month that the word `shortage' appears on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for the period 1969-1994. Using this as a general measure of shortages in the US economy, I test whether shortages help predict inflation. Using a variety of...

We document that net equity issuance is considerably more sensitive to aggregate stock returns and Q's than to firm-level stock returns and Q's. Very similar patterns also emerge when we look at merger activity. In light of earlier work (Campbell 1991, Vuolteenaho 2002) which finds that...

I study battles between short sellers and firms. Firms use a variety of methods to impede short selling, including legal threats, investigations, lawsuits, and various technical actions intended to create a short squeeze. These actions create short sale constraints. Consistent with the...

We examine some basic data on the evolution of aggregate short interest, both during the dot-com era, and at other times in history. Total short interest moves in a countercyclical fashion. For example, short interest in NASDAQ stocks actually declines as the NASDAQ index approaches its peak....

Corporate events, such as new issues and new lists, appear in waves. These waves imply that the market portfolio has a time-varying weight in new lists, and one can decompose the market return into a fixed weight return plus a timing return. Most of the reduction in aggregate market returns...