We document that the firm level hiring rate predicts stock returns in the cross-section of US publicly traded firms even after controlling for investment, size, book-to-market and momentum as well as other known predictors of stock returns. The predictability shows up in both Fama-MacBeth cross...

This paper shows that the systematic risk (or 'beta') of individual stocks increases by an economically and statistically significant amount on days of firm-specific news announcements, and reverts to its average level two to five days later. We employ intra-daily data and recent advances in...