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We examine return predictability of Australian managed funds in twenty-four categories by using twenty-nine macroeconomic indicators. The time-series regression results suggest that coal price, GDP, and Treasury bill rate have predictive power over fund returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lai, Li, Conover, and Wu (2010) propose a four-factor financial distress model to explain stock returns in the U.S. and Japanese markets. We examine this model in the stock markets of Australia, and six Asian markets (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand). We find broad empirical support for the four-factor financial distress risk asset-pricing model in those markets. The four-factor financial distress asset pricing model improves explanatory power beyond the Fama--French (1993) three-factor asset pricing model in six of the seven Asian-Pacific markets (12 of 14 portfolio groupings), while the Carhart (1997) momentum-based asset pricing model only improves explanatory power beyond the Fama--French model in three of the seven markets (4 of 14 portfolio groupings). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the intertemporal relation between the conditional mean and the conditional variance of industry portfolio returns and the Fama-French 25 size/book-to-market portfolio returns using data from Australia. We estimate the portfolio conditional covariance with the market and test whether it can predict the time-variation in the portfolio expected returns. We find strong and consistent evidence of a positive risk aversion relation, implying that the market returns do carry a positive risk premium in the Australian market. Our results suggest that the value factor is relevant for determining the variation of asset returns on both the industry portfolios and the size/book-to-market portfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]