The low beta anomaly is well documented for equity markets. However, the existence of such a factor in corporate bond markets is less explored. I find that European corporate bonds of firms with a low equity beta have higher risk-adjusted returns, on average, than European corporate bonds of...

The authors study whether the pricing of systematic factors depends on the investment horizon over which risk is measured. Market beta and Fama--French value beta are priced when risk is measured over intermediate horizons, while liquidity beta is priced over short horizons. Alpha on a...

Intangible assets are absent from traditional measures of value despite their growing importance in firms' capital stocks. We propose a simple improvement to the classic Fama and French (1992, 1993) value factor that incorporates intangibles and accounts for differences in accounting practices...

The construction of the original HML portfolio (Fama and French, 1993) includes six seemingly innocuous decisions that could easily have been replaced with alternatives that are just as reasonable. I propose such alternatives and construct HML portfolios. In sample, the average estimate of the...

This paper decomposes firm-specific monthly-varying Amihud (2002) illiquidity measure into two components: (i) systematic illiquidity; (ii) idiosyncratic illiquidity. While there is a positive and significant relationship between systematic illiquidity and one-month-ahead stock returns, the...

We study the risk-reversal premium, where out-of-the-money puts are over-priced relative to out-of-the-money calls. This effect is driven by investors’ utility preferences which lead them to over-pay for the risk reduction benefits of long puts instead of valuing options on the basis of...

This paper studies portfolio optimization through improvements of ex-ante conditional covariance estimates. We use the cross-section of stock returns over a 52-year sample to analyze trading performance by implementing the machine learning algorithm of hierarchical clustering. We find that...

A war-related factor model derived from textual analysis of media news reports explains the cross section of expected asset returns. Using a semi-supervised topic model to extract discourse topics from 7,000,000 New York Times stories spanning 160 years, the war factor predicts the cross section...

We survey the nascent literature on machine learning in the study of financial markets. We highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research. This survey is designed for both financial economists interested in grasping...