We demonstrate, using data for the period 1954-2003, that differences in exposure to consumption risk explains cross sectional differences in average excess returns (cost of equity capital) across the 25 benchmark equity portfolios constructed by Fama and French (1993). We use yearly returns on...

How does a firm in one country evaluate an investment in a firm in another country, or how does it evaluate a foreign project that the firm itself is undertaking? The firm must estimate future free cash flows just as in a domestic project, but choosing an appropriate discount rate is a...

Costs of equity for individual firms are estimated in a Bayesian framework using several factor-based pricing models. Substantial prior uncertainty about mispricing often produces an estimated cost of equity close to that obtained with mispricing precluded, even for a stock whose average return...

In most countries, equity is a cheap source of funding for a country's largest financial institutions. On average, the stocks of the top 10% financial companies in a country account for over a quarter of total market capitalization, but these stocks earn returns that are significantly lower than...

The ability of corporations to raise external equity finance varies with macroeconomic conditions, suggesting that the cost of equity issuance is time-varying. Using cross sectional data on U.S. publicly traded firms, we construct an empirical proxy of an aggregate shock to the cost of equity...

We show that firms with the least elastic demand for equity capital should benefit the most from reductions in shareholder taxes. Consistent with this prediction, we find that, following 1997 and 2003 cuts in U.S. individual shareholder taxes, financially constrained firms, and particularly...

In February 2003, the SEC officially certified a fourth credit rating agency, Dominion Bond Rating Service ("DBRS"), for use in bond investment regulations. After DBRS certification, bond yields change in the direction implied by the firm's DBRS rating relative to its ratings from other...

In a frictionless world, investment is perfectly elastic to changes in the discount rate. With financial frictions, investment is less elastic, meaning that a given magnitude of change in investment is associated with a higher magnitude of change in the discount rate. Equivalently, investment is...

This paper is the first to study the effect of financial restatement on bank loan contracting. Compared with loans initiated before restatement, loans initiated after restatement have significantly higher spreads, shorter maturities, higher likelihood of being secured, and more covenant...

This paper asks whether the asset pricing fluctuations induced by the presence of costly external finance are empirically plausible. To accomplish this, we incorporate costly external finance into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model and explore its implications for the properties of...