This paper examines investment strategies that combine time-series and cross-sectional stock sorts based on scaled price-to-earnings ratios, which I describe as relative-value strategies. Relative-value strategies buy (short) stocks that are below (above) their long-run historical absolute or...

We propose a new asset-pricing framework in which all securities' signals are used to predict each individual return. While the literature focuses on each security's own- signal predictability, assuming an equal strength across securities, our framework is flexible and includes...

We build an equilibrium model to explain why stock return predictability concentrates in bad times. The key feature is that investors use different forecasting models, and hence assess uncertainty differently. As economic conditions deteriorate, uncertainty rises and investors' opinions...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

We show analytically under quite general conditions that time-varying implied rates of return based on analysts' earnings forecasts are only a downward biased estimator for future expected one-period returns and therefore not suited for computing market risk premia in order to resolve the equity...

Motivated by the observation that elderly liquidate their mutual fund holdings regularly, we examine whether mortality patterns have a predictable impact on aggregate mutual fund flows and asset prices. Our key conjecture is that periods with high mortality rates would be associated with higher...

We develop a finite-sample procedure to test for mean-variance efficiency and spanning without imposing any parametric assumptions on the distribution of model disturbances. In so doing, we provide an exact distribution-free method to test uniform linear restrictions in multivariate linear...

Cross-sectional asset pricing tests with GMM can generate spuriouslyhigh explanatory power for factor models when the moment conditions are specifiedsuch that they allow the estimated factor means to substantially deviate from theobserved sample averages. In fact, by shifting the weights on the...