We use the adaptive LASSO from the statistical learning literature to identify economically connected industries in a general predictive regression framework. The framework permits complex industry interdependencies, including both direct and indirect sectoral links. Consistent with gradual information diffusion across economically connected industries, we find extensive evidence that lagged re...

This paper uses Hansen and Jagannathan’s (1991) volatility bounds to evaluate models with idiosyncratic consumption risk. I show that idiosyncratic risk does not change the volatility bounds at all when consumers have CRRA preferences and the distribution of the idiosyncratic shock is independent of the aggregate state. Following Mankiw (1986), I then show that idiosyncratic risk can help to en...

Existing studies show that firm asset and investment growth predict cross-sectional stock returns. Firms that shrink their assets or investments subsequently earn higher returns than firms that expand their assets or investments. I show that the superior returns of the low asset and investment growth portfolios are due to the omission of delisting returns in CRSP monthly stock return file and t...

Established illiquidity measures are constructed for emerging markets in Africa and used to determine which best explain trading costs. Costs of equity are derived from an augmented CAPM for a sample of emerging financial markets generally ignored in the literature. These include: South Africa and Namibia, three countries in North Africa and four in SSA, plus London and Paris as examples of int...

Both the equity premium puzzle and the credit spread puzzle address the problem of a reasonable size of agents’ risk aversion. The empirical estimation of risk aversion parameters is impeded by the fact that observed prices depend on risk preferences and probability beliefs. The market for German redemption lottery bonds constitutes a clean environment to estimate risk aversion coefficients fro...

In the standard real options approach to investment under uncertainty, agents formulate optimal policies under the assumptions of risk neutrality or perfect capital markets. However, in most situations, corporate executives face incomplete markets either because they receive compensation packages that restrict their portfolios or because cash flows from the firm’s investment opportunities are n...

Our objective in this article is to study analytically the effect of borrowing constraints on asset returns in an economy where agents are heterogenous with respect to their risk aversion. We use asymptotic analysis to characterize the equilibrium in a general equilibrium exchange economy with an arbitrary number of agents who differ in their risk aversion and face limits on borrowing. We find ...

We study the impact of delegated portfolio management on asset pricing in a large-scale experimental setting. As predicted by standard models, in early rounds of our experiments delegation has no impact on pricing; we replicate CAPM pricing as in earlier experiments without delegation. However, CAPM pricing fails in later rounds. We attribute this to the fund flows: investors tend to increase a...

This work presents the development of a methodology based on Monte Carlo Simulation, Fuzzy Numbers and in the Real Options Theory to determine the real options value under technical and market uncertainties. The objective of the proposed methodology is to substantially reduce the computational time involved, facilitating the decision taking process. The methodology involves: fuzzy numbers, to r...

The study empirically investigates the relationship between the value anomaly and firms’ investment and financing environment. The evidence supports the relevance of investment irreversibility and the value anomaly as suggested in Zhang (2005). The higher the investment irreversibility gap between value and growth firms, the higher the value premium. While the Fama and French three factor model...