Motivated by existing evidence of a preference among investors for assets with lottery-like payoffs and that many investors are poorly diversified, we investigate the significance of extreme positive returns in the cross-sectional pricing of stocks. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level...

This paper provides an extensive international analysis of the cross-sectional return predictive power of a variety of firm-level profitability measures, calculated from different combinations of measures of earnings and scaling variables. We show that this cross-sectional predictive relation is...

We introduce a new, hybrid measure of stock return tail covariance risk, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigate its cross-sectional predictive power. Our key innovation is that this covariance is measured across the left tail states of the...

Prior research uses the basic one-period European call-option pricing model to compute default measures for individual firms and concludes that both the size and book-to-market effects are related to default risk. For example, small firms earn higher return than big firms only if they have...

This paper provides global evidence supporting the hypothesis that expected return models are enhanced by the inclusion of variables that describe the evolution of book-to-market-changes in book value, changes in price, and net share issues. This conclusion is supported using data representing...

We examine return predictability with machine learning in 46 international stock markets. We calculate 148 stock characteristics and use them to feed a repertoire of different models. The algorithms extract predictability mainly from simple, yet popular, factor types—such as momentum,...

Does past stock price reaction to pandemics contain information about future returns? To answer this, we estimate firm exposure to a pandemic index representing global concerns of infectious diseases. We demonstrate that such a pandemic beta reliably predicts the cross-section of future stock...