Thinking about population as a driver of agricultural development provides insights into induced technical and institutional change, whether it be Esther Boserup’s declining fallow period, modern crop varieties, or the specialization pyramid that arises in laborintensive agriculture. The non-convexities of research and development, infrastructure investments, and specialization imply that modes...

Motivated by the findings that the aggregate (discretionary) accruals positively predicts oneyear-ahead firm-level stock returns and that there is a considerable amount of co-movement in firm-level (discretionary) accruals, we decompose firm-level (discretionary) accruals into a market-wide component and a firm-specific component. We document robust evidence that the two orthogonal (discretiona...

This paper provides a theoretical framework for pricing assets in a multiperiod economy with heterogeneous beliefs. The stock price dynamics follow a binomial lattice structure. Agents are allowed to differ in their beliefs of the probability and asset return in each state of nature. By constructing a consensus belief, we examine the impact of heterogeneous beliefs on market equilibrium. Static...

This paper studies the cross-sectional risk-return trade-off in the stock market. A fundamental principle in finance is the positive relation between risk and expected return, whereas recent empirical evidence suggests the opposite. We apply referencedependent preferences to shed light on this violation. Reference-dependent preferences (e.g., prospect theory) typically posit that when facing pr...

We introduce a new semiparametric model, GARCH with Functional EX ogeneous Liquidity (GARCH-FunXL), to capture the impact of liquidity, as implied by a stock exchange’s complete electronic limit order book (LOB), on asset price volatility. LOB-implied liquidity can be viewed as a functional rather than scalar or vectorial stochastic process. We adopt recent ideas from the functional data analys...

The Return to the Firm Investment in Human Capital In this paper we estimate the rate of return to firm investments in human capital in the form of formal job training. We use a panel of large firms with unusually detailed information on the duration of training, the direct costs of training, and several firm characteristics such as their output, workforce characteristics and capital stock. Our...

We study the returns to investing in VIX futures and VIX Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs). We document a substantial negative return premium for both ETNs and the futures. For example, the a constant maturity portfolio of one-month VIX futures loses about 30% per year over our sample period (2006-2013). We propose an equilibrium model to explain these negative returns. In this model, increases in v...

This paper revisits the time-series relation between the conditional risk premium and variance of the equity market portfolio. The main innovation is that we construct a measure of the ex ante equity market risk premium using corporate bond yield spread data. This measure is forward-looking and does not rely critically on either realized equity returns or instrumental variables. We find strong ...

The anomalies literature in capital markets research in finance and accounting is based (almost) exclusively on average realized returns. In contrast, we construct accountingbased expected returns for dollar-neutral long-short trading strategies formed on a wide array of anomaly variables, including book to market, size, composite issuance, net stock issues, abnormal investment, asset growth, i...

I study managers' risk-taking behavior and how it is affected by equity-based compensation. I find that in response to an exogenous increase in takeover protection in Delaware during the mid-1990s, managers lower firm risk by 5%. I also find that the decrease in firm risk is concentrated among firms with low managerial equity-based incentives. In particular, firms with low CEO portfolio sensiti...