This paper documents a significantly negative cross-sectional relation between left-tail risk and future returns on individual stocks trading in the U.S. and international countries. We provide a behavioral explanation to this anomaly based on the idea that investors underestimate the...

Motivated by the nature of asset pricing models, we investigate the cross-sectional relation between the market's ex-ante view of a stock's risk and the stock's ex-ante expected return. We demonstrate that an ex-ante measure of expected returns based on analyst price targets is highly related to...

This paper provides an analysis of the predictability of stock returns using market, industry, and firm-level earnings. Contrary to Lamont (1998), we find that neither dividend payout ratio nor the level of aggregate earnings can forecast the excess market return. We show that these variables do...

Investment bankers focus on narrow, industry-based peer groups for individual stock valuation. And some market-neutral equity hedge fund managers restrict their portfolios to be sector-neutral as well. Yet, academic research into contrarian strategy investment performance has typically invoked...