We use a mean-variance approach to address the classic puzzle of British capital export in the 19th century. Our analysis shows that foreign securities listed in London offered significant diversification benefits to British investors. In simple terms, international diversification reduced risk. Conservative estimates of the optimal investment portfolio for a domestic investor suggest that the balance between foreign and domestic security offerings on the London Exchange was close to what classic equilibrium models of asset prices would suggest.

Some of the leading theories of momentum have different empirical predictions that depend on market composition and structure. The institutional theory predicts lower momentum profits in markets with less agency. Behavioral theories predict lower profits in markets with more sophisticated investors. In this paper, we use a dataset from a major 19th century equity market to test these predictions. We find no evidence to support the institutional theory due to the lack of delegated management. We exploit a regulatory change in the middle of our sample period to test behavioral theories. We find evidence consistent with overreaction theories of momentum.

This paper addresses the bias associated with parametric measurement of timing skill based on monthly timer returns when timers can make daily timing decisions. Simulations suggest that the classic Henriksson-Merton parametric measure of timing skill is weak and biased downward when applied to the monthly returns of a daily timer. The paper proposes an adjustment that mitigates this problem without the need to collect daily timer returns. Four tests of timing skill, carried out on a sample of 558 mutual funds, show that very few funds exhibit statistically significant timing skill. More encompassing, the adjusted-FF3 test (based on the specification that incorporates both the proposed adjustment and the Fama-French three-factor model) is the least biased measure of timing skill among the four—it provides for a sharper inference regarding timing skill and helps mitigate biases associated with the choice of investment style.

We use a two-year panel of individual accounts in an S&P 500 index mutual fund to examine the trading and investment behavior of more than 91 thousand investors who have chosen a low-cost, passively managed vehicle for savings.This allows us to characterize investors' heterogeneity in terms of their investment patterns.In particular, we identify positive feedback traders as well as contrarians whose activities are conditional upon preceding day stock market moves.We test the consistency and profitability of these conditional strategies over time.We find that more frequent traders are typically contrarians, while infrequent traders are more typically momentum investors.The dynamics of these investor classes help us to partially examine the question of the marginal investor over the period of our study.We find that the behavior of momentum investors is typically more correlated to changes in the S&P 500 and we trace its dynamics over time.We build up "behavioral factors" based on contrarian and momentum flows and show that they perform well against a benchmark of loadings on latent factors extracted from returns.We also use the behavior of momentum and contrarian investors to build a measure of "market polarization".This captures the dispersion of beliefs among the investors and helps to account for asset pricing better than standard measures of dispersion of beliefs.

This paper separates the components of capital appreciation returns in an asset market into fixed and stochastic portions. It proposes a control for the problem of fixed components in the capital appreciation return used in transactions-based return estimates. We find a consistent bias in the index resulting from repeat sales regressions which may be eliminated through simple methods. The sign and magnitude of the bias, as well as its systematic variation across property, suggest that it is caused by incremental home improvements, as well as by price risk. We propose a maximum likelihood method for estimating the first and second moments of the fixed and temporal components of real estate returns that relies upon relatively small samples.

Long‐term estimates of expected return on equities are typically derived from U.S. data only. There are reasons to suspect that these estimates are subject to survivorship, as the United States is arguably the most successful capitalist system in the world. We collect a database of capital appreciation indexes for 39 markets going back to the 1920s. For 1921 to 1996, U.S. equities had the highest real return of all countries, at 4.3 percent, versus a median of 0.8 percent for other countries. The high equity premium obtained for U.S. equities appears to be the exception rather than the rule.