We combine annual stock market data for the most important equity markets of the last four centuries: the Netherlands/U.K. (1629-1812), U.K. (1813-1870) and U.S. (1871-2015). We show that dividend yields are stationary and consistently forecast returns. The documented predictability holds for...

We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...

A four-factor model with two "mispricing" factors, in addition to market and size factors, accommodates a large set of anomalies better than notable four- and five-factor alternative models. Moreover, our size factor reveals a small-firm premium nearly twice usual estimates. The mispricing...

We study a search and bargaining model of an asset market, where investors' heterogeneous valuations for the asset are drawn from an arbitrary distribution. Our solution technique makes the model fully tractable and allows us to provide a full characterization of the unique equilibrium, in...

Limits to arbitrage play a central role in behavioral finance. They are thought to interfere with arbitrage processes so that security prices can deviate from true values for extended periods of time. We describe a recent financial innovation that allows limits to arbitrage to be sidestepped,...

Despite positive and significant earnings announcement premia, we find that institutional investors reduce their exposure to stocks before earnings announcements. A novel result on the sensitivity of flows to individual stock returns provides a potential explanation. We show that extreme...

We construct a price, dividend, and earnings series for the Industrials sector, the Utilities sector, and the Railroads sector from the beginning of the 1870s until the beginning of the year 2013 from primary sources. To infer about mispricings in the sector markets over more than a century, we...

A war-related factor model derived from textual analysis of media news reports explains the cross section of expected asset returns. Using a semi-supervised topic model to extract discourse topics from 7,000,000 New York Times stories spanning 160 years, the war factor predicts the cross section...

A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...