We quantify the effect of financial leverage on stock return volatility in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with debt and equity claims. We study the effects of financial leverage on the market portfolio, and on a small firm with idiosyncratic and market risk. In an economy with both a...

We examine overconfidence among equity mutual fund managers. While overconfidence has been extensively documented among retail investors, evidence from professional investors is scarce. Consistent with theories of overconfidence, we find that fund managers trade more after good past performance....

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

This article documents how the changing composition of U.S. publicly traded firms has prompted a decline in the long-run mean of the aggregate dividend-price ratio, most notably since the 1970s. Adjusting the dividend-price ratio for such changes resolves several issues with respect to the...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a promising approach to resolve prominent asset pricing puzzles. The simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, but caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a twostep...

We examine overconfidence among equity mutual fund managers. While overconfidence has been extensively documented among retail investors, evidence from professional investors is scarce. Consistent with theories of overconfidence, we find that fund managers trade more after good past performance....

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

Financial economists have long been interested in the empirical relation between the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock market returns, often referred to as the risk-return relation. Unfortunately, the body of empirical evidence on the risk-return relation is mixed and...

Value stocks have higher average returns than growth stocks. At the same time, the duration of value stocks' cash flows is considerably shorter than that of growth stocks. We show that when investors can fully distinguish short- and long-run consumption risk components of dividend growth...

Evidence of stock return predictability by financial ratios is still controversial, as documented by inconsistent results for in-sample and out-of-sample regressions and by substantial parameter instability. This paper shows that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if the...