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...

Firm size and book-to-market ratios are both highly correlated with the returns of common stocks. Fama and French (1993) have argued that the association between these firm characteristics and their stock returns arises because size and book-to-market ratios are proxies for non-diversifiable...

We provide a model of closed-end fund pricing which includes investors who do not form expectations correctly and allows for salient country-specific news to affect this expectation formation process. We use panel data on prices and net asset values of closed- end country funds to examine...

This study assesses the impact of exchange rate variability on the riskiness of U.S. multinational firms by examining the relation between exchange rate variability and stock return volatility and by decomposing this relation into components of systematic and diversifiable risk. Focusing on two...

This paper examines the hypothesis that the superior return to so-called value stocks is the result of expectational errors made by investors. We study stock price reactions around earnings announcements for value and glamour stocks over a 5 year period after portfolio formation. The...

Returns in emerging capital markets are very different from returns in developed markets. While most previous research has focused on average returns, we analyze the volatility of the returns in emerging equity markets. We characterize the time-series of volatility in emerging markets and...

This paper examines the effect of the benefits of corporate control to managers on the relationship between managerial ownership and the stock returns of acquiring firms in corporate control transactions. At low levels of managerial ownership, agency costs of equity (such as perquisite...

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...

The predictability of monthly stock returns is investigated from the perspective of a risk-averse investor who uses the data to update initially vague beliefs about the conditional distribution of returns. The optimal stocks-versus-cash allocation of the investor can depend importantly on the...

This paper seeks to develop a structural model that lets data on asset returns and trading volume speak to whether volatility autocorrelation comes from the fundamental that the trading process is pricing or, is caused by the trading process itself. Returns and volume data argue, in the context...