The largest commercial bank stocks, ranked by total size of the balance sheet, have significantly lower risk-adjusted returns than small- and medium-sized bank stocks, even though large banks are significantly more levered. We uncover a size factor in the component of bank returns that is...

In this paper, we attempt to explain differences between the US and UK household wealth distributions, with an emphasis on the quite different porfolios held in stock and housing equities in the two countries. As a proportion of their total wealth, British households hold relatively small...

We apply the method of constrained asset share estimation (CASE) to test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) of the stock market. This method allows conditional expected returns to vary in relatively unrestricted ways. The data estimate reasonably the price of risk, and, in some cases, the MVE...

The extant literature predicts market returns with "simple" models that use only a few parameters. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we theoretically prove that simple models severely understate return predictability compared to "complex" models in which the number of parameters exceeds the...

Identifying stock connections by shared analyst coverage, we find that a connected-stock (CS) momentum factor generates a monthly alpha of 1.68% (t = 9.67). In spanning regressions, the alphas of industry, geographic, customer, customer/supplier industry, single- to multi-segment, and technology...

Using a panel of international government bond data, I construct fixed income portfolios that match the duration of the dividend strips of the corresponding local aggregate stock market index. I find that these bond portfolios have performed as well as -- if not better than -- their stock...

We revisit several leading puzzles about the aggregate stock market by incorporating into a standard dividend discount model survey expectations of earnings of S&P 500 firms. Using survey expectations, while keeping discount rates constant, explains a significant part of "excess" stock price...

We examine information spillover as a source of stock return synchronicity, where information about highly-followed "prominent" stocks is used to price other "neglected" stocks sharing a common fundamental component. We find that stocks followed by few analysts co-move significantly with...

We propose forecasting separately the three components of stock market returns: dividend yield, earnings growth, and price-earnings ratio growth. We obtain out-of-sample R-square coefficients (relative to the historical mean) of nearly 1.6% with monthly data and 16.7% with yearly data using the...

This paper investigates the market reaction to the information released in security analyst reports. It shows that the market reacts significantly and positively to changes in recommendation levels, earnings forecasts, and price targets. While changes in price targets and earnings forecasts both...