Do financial markets properly reflect leverage? Unlike Gomes and Schmid (2010) who examine this question with a structural approach (using long-term monthly stock characteristics), my paper examines it with a quasi-experimental approach (using short-term a discrete event). After a firm has...

We test whether the impact of financial constraints on firm value is observable in asset" returns. We form portfolios of firms based on observable characteristics related to financial" constraints, and test for common covariation in the stock returns of these firms. Using several" different...

We introduce a new text-mining methodology that extracts sentiment information from news articles to predict asset returns. Unlike more common sentiment scores used for stock return prediction (e.g., those sold by commercial vendors or built with dictionary-based methods), our supervised...

We combine annual stock market data for the most important equity markets of the last four centuries: the Netherlands/U.K. (1629-1812), U.K. (1813-1870) and U.S. (1871-2015). We show that dividend yields are stationary and consistently forecast returns. The documented predictability holds for...

A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...

Recent evidence of excessive comovement among stocks following index additions (Barberis, Shleifer, and Wurgler, 2005) and stock splits (Green and Hwang, 2009) challenges traditional finance theory. Based on a simple model, we show that the bivariate regressions relied upon in the literature...

Despite positive and significant earnings announcement premia, we find that institutional investors reduce their exposure to stocks before earnings announcements. A novel result on the sensitivity of flows to individual stock returns provides a potential explanation. We show that extreme...

We propose a nonparametric method to test which characteristics provide independent information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...