Events

The identification of factors that predict the cross-section of stock returns has been a focus of asset pricing theory for decades. We address this challenging problem for both equity performance and risk, the latter through the maximum drawdown measure. We test a variety of regression-based models used in the field of supervised learning including penalized linear regression, tree-based models, and neural networks. Using empirical data in the US market from January 1980 to June 2018, we find that a number of firm characteristics succeed in explaining the cross-sectional variation of...

Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed covariates. It is often believed that the more covariates we condition on, the more plausible this unconfoundedness assumption is. This belief has had a huge impact on practical causal inference, suggesting that we should adjust for all pretreatment covariates. However, when there is unmeasured confounding between the treatment and outcome...

There is a source of bias in the sample eigenvectors of financial covariance matrices, when unchecked, distorts weights of minimum variance portfolios and leads to risk forecasts that are severely biased downward. Recent work with Lisa Goldberg and Alex Shkolnik develops an eigenvector bias correction. Our approach is distinct from the regularization and eigenvalue shrinkage methods found in the literature. We provide theoretical guarantees on the improvement our correction provides as well as estimation methods for computing the optimal correction from data.

Nonstandard analysis, a powerful machinery derived from mathematical logic, has had many applications in probability theory as well as stochastic processes. Nonstandard analysis allows construction of a single object - a hyperfinite probability space - which satisfies all the first order logical properties of a finite probability space, but which can be simultaneously viewed as a measure-theoretical probability space via the Loeb construction. As a consequence, the hyperfinite/measure duality has proven to be particularly in porting discrete results into their continuous settings. In this...