Capital market assumptions (CMAs), which are long-term risk and return forecasts for asset classes, are important pillars of the investment industry. However, applying them reliably in portfolio construction has been (and still is) a challenge in the industry. Despite the difficulties, this...

There is a myriad of financial anomalies in the cross-section of equity returns. They have been widely studied in the literature, which gives investors a large choice in terms of investment styles. In this paper, the authors show a perhaps unappreciated quality of financial anomalies: they...

This material was presented at the 3rd Frontiers of Factor Investing Conference at Lancaster, England.When assets' expected returns follow a factor structure subject to pricing errors, we show that the mean-variance portfolio can be used to obtain a set of implied factor risk premia. Contrary to...

This material was presented at the Canadian Association of Alternative Strategies & Assets 2021 annual conference. It is based on the publish paper: Portfolio Tilts Using Views on Macroeconomic Regimes.Long-term investors tilt their portfolios given their views on the evolving investment...

This paper shows that financial covenants have no value for creditors of highly levered firms, because an attempt to enforce their rights in technical default would result in a lower payoff than continued operations under shareholders' control. This explains the widespread use of cov-lite loans...

We estimate the costs of financial distress prior to default (pre-default costs) separately from the loss incurred at default (the loss given default) using a dynamic trade-off model of capital structure. We document that pre-default costs are on average equal to 6.5% of firm value per year. We...

We develop 50 novel indices of State-level Economic Policy Uncertainty (SEPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency using 204 million state newspaper articles from January 1990 to December 2019. We assess the validity of our measures. Our SEPU indices vary counter-cyclically with respect to...

We develop a dynamic capital structure model to study how manager-shareholders agency conflicts affect the joint determination of financing and investment decisions. We show that the consumption of private benefits channel leads managers not only to choose a lower optimal leverage, but also to...

Long-term investors rebalance their portfolios given their views on the investment landscape. Portfolio tilting is often implemented using investors' views on point estimates of asset expected returns which are notoriously difficult to estimate and lead to unstable portfolio weights. We avoid...