We review the literature on return and cash flow growth predictability form the perspective of the present-value identity. We focus predominantly on recent work. Our emphasis is on U.S. aggregate stock return predictability, but we also discuss evidence from other asset classes and countries.

We study put option sales undertaken by corporations during their repurchase programs. Put sales' main theoretical motivation is market timing, providing an excellent framework for studying whether security issues reflect managers' ability to identify mispricing. Our evidence is that these bets...

The appropriate measure of cash flow for valuing corporate assets is net payout, which is the sum of dividends, interest, and net repurchases of equity and debt. Variation in net payout yield, the ratio of net payout to asset value, is mostly driven by movements in expected cash flow growth,...

Mutual funds are pooled investment vehicles with diverse tax clienteles. Whereas many mutual funds are held primarily by taxable investors, a significant fraction of mutual fund assets are held in tax-qualified retirement accounts. Our paper investigates whether the characteristics, investment...

This paper proposes a simple homogeneous dynamic model of investment and corporate risk management for a financially constrained firm. Following Froot, Scharfstein, and Stein (1993), we define a corporation's risk management as the coordination of investment and financing decisions. In our...

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...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies — momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns — a...

This paper studies the performance of a large number of anomalies after accounting for transaction costs, and the effectiveness of several transaction cost mitigation strategies. It finds that introducing a buy/hold spread, which allows investors to continue to hold stocks that they would not...

We empirically examine the order flows spillovers between Nasdaq and the Forex markets in 2008 and 2009. With emphasis on a role of high-frequency traders (HFTs) who aggregate information between the two markets as well as within each market, our results show that HFTs in Nasdaq trade...