We examine the market mispricing and limits-to-arbitrage hypotheses on the positive relation between cash holdings and expected stock returns. Using investor sentiment as a proxy for market mispricing, we find that returns of cash holding stocks are heavily influenced by investor sentiment....

We examine the investor sentiment and limits-to-arbitrage explanations for the positive cross-sectional relation between cash holdings and future stock returns. Consistent with the investor sentiment hypothesis, we find that the cash holding effect is significant when sentiment is low, and it is...

This paper examines stock liquidity in explaining the mixed relations between financial constraints and stock returns and the pricing of stock liquidity across financially constrained and unconstrained firms. We find a negative relation in liquid portfolios and a positive relation in illiquid...

We examine the explanation of model misspecification for the cash-holding effect that stocks with the highest cash-to-asset ratios outperform stocks with the lowest ratios. We find that the Fama-French (1993, 2015) three- and five-factor models, and the q-factor model produce high Gibbons Ross...

In examining the staggered recognition of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) as an exogenous shock to trade secret protection, we demonstrate that firms display lower stock returns following the recognition in a difference-in-differences (DID) design. Cross-sectional regression results...

As opposed to the “low beta low risk” convention, we show that low beta stocks are illiquid and exposed to high liquidity risk. After adjusting for liquidity risk, low beta stocks no longer outperform high beta stocks. Although investors who “bet against beta” earn a significant beta...

Employment growth (EG) is likely related to liquidity fundamentals of investment opportunities, firm health, and information environment. This, in turn, implies that liquidity risk may play a role in explaining the relation between employment growth and stock returns. We explain the link between...

In this paper, we make a liquidity adjustment to the consumption-based capital asset pricing model (CCAPM) and show that the liquidity-adjusted CCAPM is a generalized model of Acharya and Pedersen (2005). Using different proxies for transaction costs such as the effective trading costs measure...

In this paper, we propose a liquidity risk adjustment to the Epstein and Zin (1989, 1991) model and assess the adjusted model's performance against the traditional consumption pricing models. We show that liquidity is a significant risk factor and it adds considerable explanatory power to the...

Growth opportunity bias (GOB), measured as the difference between market and fundamental values of a firm's growth opportunity, has an ability to predict future stock returns. In the portfolio sort, downward-biased GOB firms earn higher returns than upward-biased GOB firms, which is unexplained...