NBER Publications by Turan G. Bali

Motivated by existing evidence of a preference among investors for assets with lottery-like payoffs and that many investors are poorly diversified, we investigate the significance of extreme positive returns in the cross-sectional pricing of stocks. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a negative and significant relation between the maximum daily return over the past one month (MAX) and expected stock returns. Average raw and risk-adjusted return differences between stocks in the lowest and highest MAX deciles exceed 1% per month. These results are robust to controls for size, book-to-market, momentum, short-term reversals, liquidity, and skewness. Of particular interest, including MAX reverses the puzzling negative relation between returns and idios...

Recent theoretical models based on dynamic human capital formation, or social influence, suggest an inverse relationship between criminal activity and economic opportunity and between criminal activity and deterrence, but predict an asymmetric response of crime. In this paper we use three different data sets and three different empirical methodologies to document this previously-unnoticed regularity. Using nonparametric methods we show that the behavior of property crime is asymmetric over time, where increases are sharper but decreases are gradual. Using aggregate time-series U.S. data as well as data from New York City we demonstrate that property crime reacts more (less) strongly to increases (decreases) in the unemployment rate, to decreases (increases) in per capita real GDP and to de...