Conventional tests of the predictability of stock returns could be invalid, that is reject the null too frequently, when the predictor variable is persistent and its innovations are highly correlated with returns. We develop a pretest to determine whether the conventional t-test leads to invalid...

Using a large representative sample of Indian retail equity investors, many of them new to the stock market, we show that both years of investment experience and feedback from investment returns have significant effects on investor behavior, favored stock styles, and performance. We identify two...

Optimal investment of firms implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity (two major components of the marginal benefit of...

Is the value premium predictable? We study time-variations of the expected value premium using a two-state Markov switching model. We find that when conditional volatilities are high, the expected excess returns of value stocks are more sensitive to aggregate economic conditions than the...

We construct accounting-based costs of equity for dollar neutral long-short trading strategies formed on a comprehensive list of anomaly variables. These variables include book-to-market, size, composite issuance, net stock issues, abnormal investment, asset growth, investment-to-assets,...

The covariance between US Treasury bond returns and stock returns has moved considerably over time. While it was slightly positive on average in the period 1953--2009, it was unusually high in the early 1980''s and negative in the 2000''s, particularly in the downturns of 2000--02 and 2007--09....

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

To estimate the equity premium, it is helpful to use finance theory: not the old-fashioned theory that efficient markets imply a constant equity premium, but theory that restricts the time-series behavior of valuation ratios, and that links the cross-section of stock prices to the level of the...

Building on neoclassical reasoning, we propose a new multi-factor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity. The neo- classical three-factor model outperforms traditional factor models in explaining the average returns across...

More financially constrained firms are riskier and earn higher expected returns than less financially constrained firms, although this effect can be subsumed by size and book-to-market. Further, because the stochastic discount factor makes capital investment more procyclical, financial...