This paper tests the conjecture that the value premium constructed from the cross-section of stocks proxies for investment opportunities by investigating whether it helps explain the puzzling empirical risk-return tradeoff in the stock market across time. In contrast with many early authors, we...

We uncover a positive stock market risk-return tradeoff after controlling for the covariance of market returns with the value premium. Fama and French (1996) conjecture that the value premium proxies for investment opportunities; therefore, by ignoring it, early specifications suffer from an...