NBER Working Papers by Joshua Pollet

We estimate the risk and expected returns of private equity investments based on the market prices of exchange-traded funds of funds that invest in unlisted private equity funds. Our results indicate that the market expects unlisted private equity funds to earn abnormal returns of approximately 1% per year. We also find that the market expects listed private equity funds to earn zero or marginally negative abnormal returns net of fees. Both listed and unlisted private equity funds have market betas close to one and positive factor loadings on the Fama-French SMB factor. Private equity fund returns are positively related to GDP growth and negatively related to the credit spread. In addition, we find that market returns of exchange traded funds of funds and listed private equity funds predic...

An ongoing debate sets capital budgeting against market timing. The primary difficulty in evaluating these theories is finding distinct exogenous proxies for investment opportunities and mispricing. We use demand shifts induced by demographics to address this problem, and hence, provide a more definitive analysis of the theories. According to capital budgeting, industries anticipating positive demand shifts in the near future should issue more equity (and debt) to finance additional capacity. To the extent that demographic shifts in the more distant future are not incorporated into equity prices, market timing implies that industries anticipating positive demand shifts in the distant future should issue less equity due to undervaluation. We find evidence supporting both capital budgeting a...

Do firms release news strategically in response to investor inattention? We consider news about earnings and analyze the response of returns to announcements on Friday and other weekdays. Friday announcements have less immediate and more delayed stock return response. The delayed response as a percentage of the total response is 60 percent on Friday and 40 percent on other weekdays. In addition, abnormal trading volume around announcement day is 10 percent lower for Friday announcements. These findings suggest that weekends distract investor attention temporarily. They support explanations of post-earning announcement drift based on underreaction to information caused by limited attention. We also document that firms release worse announcements on Friday. Friday announcements are associate...

Do investors pay enough attention to long-term fundamentals? We consider the case of demographic information. Cohort size fluctuations produce forecastable demand changes for age-sensitive sectors, such as toys, bicycles, beer, life insurance, and nursing homes. These demand changes are predictable once a specific cohort is born. We use lagged consumption and demographic data to forecast future consumption demand growth induced by changes in age structure. We find that demand forecasts predict profitability by industry. Moreover, forecasted demand changes 5 to 10 years in the future predict annual industry returns. One additional percentage point of annualized demand growth due to demographics predicts a 5 to 10 percentage point increase in annual abnormal industry stock returns. However, ...