Although sustained superior firm performance may arise from skillful management or other valuable, rare, and inimitable resources, it can also result from randomness. Studying U.S. companies from 1965-2008, we benchmark how long a firm must perform at a high level to be confident that it is something other than the outcome of a time-homogeneous stationary Markov chain defined on the state space…
In measuring performance persistence, we use hedge fund style benchmarks. This allows us to identify managers with valuable skills, and also to control for option-like features inherent in returns from hedge fund strategies. We take into account the possibility that reported asset values may be based on stale prices. We develop a statistical model that relates a hedge fund's performance to its …
We explore the cross-sectional pricing of volatility risk by decomposing equity market volatility into short- and long-run components. Our finding that prices of risk are negative and significant for both volatility components implies that investors pay for insurance against increases in volatility, even if those increases have little persistence. The short-run component captures market skewnes…
We study the evolution of price level dispersion in Europe by combining time-series information on harmonized indices of consumer prices (HICPs) with occasional observations of absolute price levels. We find that European price levels converged over much of the last 40 to 50 years. In the United States, our benchmark, price level dispersion is more or less stable. A back-of-the-envelope calcula…
Investigation of an index of returns on professionally managed currency funds and a subset of returns from 34 individual currency fund managers finds that over the 1990-2006 period, currency fund managers earned excess returns averaging 25 bps per month. The study examines the relationship of these returns to four factors that represent the returns from distinct styles of currency trading-carry…
The study reported here examined the long-term impact of Russell 2000 Index rebalancing on portfolio evaluation. A buy-and-hold index portfolio outperformed the annually rebalanced index in the 1979-2004 period by an average of 2.22 percent over one year and 17.29 percent over five years. Although short-term momentum and the poor long-term returns of new issues partially explain these returns, …
We study an institutional investment problem in which a centralized decision maker, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO), for example, employs multiple asset managers to implement investment strategies in separate asset classes. The CIO allocates capital to the managers who, in turn, allocate these funds to the assets in their asset class. This two-step investment process causes several misalignm…
This article introduces the concept of a stock value gap - the shortfall of a firm's actual market value from its optimal market value, as measured by a best-performing benchmark. Using a large-scale, real-world database, the authors test the effects of both customer satisfaction and customer complaint on the stock value gap of firms. The results show that customer complaint has a stronger effe…
This study addresses a problem commonly encountered by marketers who attempt to assess the impact of their sales promotions-namely, the lack of data on competitive marketing activity. In most industries, competing firms may have competitive sales data from syndicated services or trade organizations, but they seldom have access to data on competitive promotions at the customer level. Promotion r…
Drawing from the literature on buyers' uncertainty in preference and product knowledge, the authors suggest and empirically test the proposition that a consumer's reservation price for a product is more meaningfully and accurately represented as a range than as a single point. Given this conceptualization, they propose an approach for incentive-compatible elicitation of a consumer's reservation…
Market-based organizational learning has been identified as an important source of sustainable competitive advantage. One particular learning mechanism, benchmarking, is a widely used management tool that has been recognized as appropriate for identifying and enhancing valuable marketing capabilities. However, despite widespread admonitions to managers, the benchmarking of marketing capabilitie…
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