Investment products tracking the performance of equity indices have become irreplaceable in the investment community. We are the first to analyze the impact of index replacements and the choice of indexing methodologies on relative performance of both, price and dividend indices. We implement an...

Important dimensions of dividend behavior are not well understood. How do dividends behave in extreme states of the world? Why is the risk premium on dividend claims so high? Would dividend bans in crisis states have plausible effects on firms' cost of capital? In this paper we use evidence from...

We analyze short-duration equity investments using traded claims on index dividends. We show that investment strategies with constant short maturity outperform a systematic long position in the underlying equity index on a risk-adjusted basis and in absolute terms. Furthermore, we find higher...

This paper studies time variation in the expected excess returns of traded claims on dividends, bonds, and stock indices for international markets. We introduce a novel dividend risk factor that complements the well-known bond risk factor of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). When the dividend risk...

The recent empirical literature concludes that characteristics such as value and momentum explain and predict the cross-sectional dispersion of asset returns fairly well. I extend this evidence to Emerging Markets assets by analyzing a comprehensive data set consisting of sovereign bonds...

Contrary to the intuition that the standard risk-return tradeoff should lead to underperformance of a portfolio that scales down exposure during volatile periods a recent paper by Moreira and Muir (2017) actually shows that volatility-managed portfolios produce robust and significant alphas. The...