3 Share Nobel Economics Prize for Work Using Natural Experiments

by James Comtois, Pensions & Investments, October 11, 2021: David Card of U.C. Berkeley, Joshua D. Angrist of MIT, and Guido W. Imbens of Stanford were recognized for their “innovative use of natural experiments to study difficult-to-answer questions about cause and effect,” noted Bruce Jacobs, adding that the winners... “searched for situations in which chance events and changes in institutional rules and policies create groups of people who are treated differently, setting up what amounts to natural clinical trials.”

Jessica Wachter Named SEC Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis

Press Release, May 3, 2021: The Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs Chair of Quantitative Finance at the Wharton School, Dr. Jessica Wachter, has been appointed Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis at the SEC.

Factor Modeling: The Benefits of Disentangling Cross-Sectionally for Explaining Stock Returns

by Bruce I. Jacobs and Kenneth N. Levy, Journal of Portfolio Management, May 2021: More than three decades ago, Bruce Jacobs and Ken Levy introduced the idea of disentangling stock returns across numerous firm characteristic factors. Some years later, an alternative factor model proposed by Fama and French made use of time-series... factors based on portfolio sorts (examples of these time-series factors include the return differences between small- and big-capitalization stocks and between high- and low-book-to-price stocks). Recently, Fama and French found that the cross-sectional approach using firm characteristics is better able to explain stock returns than the time-series approach based on portfolio sorts. In this article, Jacobs and Levy compare the two models and discuss the benefits of the cross-sectional approach for investment management.