In a frictionless world, investment is perfectly elastic to changes in the discount rate. With financial frictions, investment is less elastic, meaning that a given magnitude of change in investment is associated with a higher magnitude of change in the discount rate. Equivalently, investment is...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their capital investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-rate hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increases with the...

We propose a new multifactor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity motivated from neoclassical reasoning. The neoclassical three-factor model goes a long way in explaining the average returns across testing portfolios formed...

The neoclassical q-theory is a good start to understand the cross section of returns. Under constant return to scale, stock returns equal levered investment returns that are tied directly with characteristics. This equation generates the relations of average returns with book-to-market,...

Fama and French (2002) estimate the equity premium using dividend growth rates to measure expected rates of capital gain. We use a similar method to study the value premium. From 1941 to 2005, the expected HML return is on average 6.0% per annum, consisting of an expected dividend-growth...

We use a fully-specified neoclassical model augmented with costly external equity as a laboratory to study the relations between stock returns and equity financing decisions. Simulations show that the model can simultaneously and in many cases quantitatively reproduce: procyclical equity issuance;...

The q-theory implies that investment is a first-order determinant of the cross section of expected returns, and that optimal investment drives the external financing anomalies. Our neoclassical model simultaneously and in many cases quantitatively reproduces: Procyclical equity issuance waves;...

We conduct a comprehensive study of the cyclical movements in economic fundamentals for value and growth firms. We document that the fundamentals of value firms are more adversely affected by negative business cycle shocks than those of growth firms. The differential response between value and...

We take a simple q-theory model and ask how well it can explain external financing anomalies, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our central insight is that optimal investment is an important driving force of these anomalies. The model simultaneously reproduces procyclical equity issuance...