For the investor types believing that active managers can generate alphas, we nd that the ability to identify superior performing funds is further improved, albeit slightly, by augmenting the four-factor model with country indices, even if these indices represent non-priced factors, consis- tent with Pastor and Stambaugh (2002a). To illustrate, our baseline analysis nds CAPM alpha enhancements of up to 5% per year from using macroeconomic state variables to choose funds, relative to active manager choice using an unconditional CAPM model. Further improvements of up to 1% per year are attained from the tighter predictive distribution for fund alphas obtained using the Pastor-Stambaugh (2002a,b) specication, which, in.
