Volatility permeates modern financial theories and decision making processes. As such, accurate measures and good forecasts of future volatility are critical for the implementation and evaluation of asset pricing theories. In response to this, a voluminous literature has emerged for modeling the...

This paper is an investigation into the determinants of asymmetries in stock returns. We develop a series of cross-sectional regression specifications which attempt to forecast skewness in the daily returns of individual stocks. Negative skewness is most pronounced in stocks that have...

We construct portfolios of stocks and of bonds that are maximally predictable with respect to a set of ex ante observable economic variables, and show that these levels of predictability are statistically significant, even after controlling for data-snooping biases. We disaggregate the sources...

According to the dynamic version of the Gordon growth model, the long-run expected return on stocks, stock yield, is the sum of the dividend yield on stocks plus some weighted average of expected future growth rates in dividends. We construct a measure of stock yield based on sell-side analysts'...

We propose that innovative originality (InnOrig) is a valuable organizational resource, and that owing to limited investor attention and skepticism of complexity, firms with greater InnOrig are undervalued. We find that firms' InnOrig strongly predicts higher, more persistent, and less volatile...

We propose and test a novel economic mechanism that generates stock return predictability on both the time series and the cross section. In our model, investors' income has two sources, wages and dividends, that grow stochastically over time. As a consequence, the fraction of total income...

We ask whether stock returns in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US are predictable by three instruments: the dividend yield, the earnings yield and the short rate. The predictability regression is suggested by a present value model with earnings growth, payout ratios and the short rate as...

The aggregate dividend payout ratio forecasts aggregate excess returns on both stocks and corporate bonds in post-war US data. Both high corporate profits and high stock prices forecast low excess returns on equities. When the payout ratio is high, expected returns are high. The payout ratio's...

Conventional tests of the predictability of stock returns could be invalid, that is reject the null too frequently, when the predictor variable is persistent and its innovations are highly correlated with returns. We develop a pretest to determine whether the conventional t-test leads to invalid...