Cross-sectional forecasts of conservative and optimistic biases in analyst earnings estimates predict a stock's future returns, especially for firms that are hard to value. Trading strategies--whether based on the component of analyst bias that is correlated with major return anomalies or the...

This paper explores commonalities across asset pricing anomalies. In particular, we assess implications of financial distress for the profitability of anomaly-based trading strategies. Strategies based on price momentum, earnings momentum, credit risk, dispersion, idiosyncratic volatility, and...

Decomposing lending fees into predicted (fair) and residual (premium or discount) fees reveals overpricing among a third of hard-to-borrow stocks: those for which borrowers pay a premium. Despite paying the highest fees, they are the only profitable shorters. Their net annualized profits of 5%...

The distress anomaly reflects the abnormally low returns of high credit risk stocks during financial distress. Evidence from stocks and corporate bonds reinforces the anomaly and challenges rationales based on shareholders' ability to extract value from bondholders, time-varying betas,...

This paper shows that distressed stocks and bonds are overpriced during high sentiment periods. The correction of overpricing leads to a range of anomalous cross-sectional patterns in stock and bond returns. Including bonds as additional test assets allows us to develop testable restrictions...

Using novel corporate Twitter data on all U.S. public firms, we show that firms with a Twitter account earn 50 basis points per month higher returns than similar firms without a Twitter account. This `Twitter premium' is higher among smaller firms and firms with higher fundamentals uncertainty,...

This paper provides new evidence on the empirical success of structural models in explaining corporate credit risk changes. A parsimonious set of common factors and firm-level fundamentals, inspired by structural models, explains more than 54% (67%) of the variation in credit spread changes for...

Predictable biases in analyst forecasts, both conservative and optimistic, distort share prices, but only for firms with hard-to-forecast earnings---those with extreme past returns, credit risk, idiosyncratic volatility, and other attributes linked to 14 popular anomalies. The prevalence of...

Classifying mandatory 13F stock-holding filings by manager type reveals that hedge fund strategies are mostly contrarian, while mutual fund strategies are largely trend following. The only institutional performers — the 2/3 of hedge fund managers that are contrarian — earn alpha of 2.4% per...

We propose a mean-reverting stochastic process for the market beta. In a simulation study, the proposed model generates significantly more precise beta estimates than GARCH betas, betas conditioned on aggregate or firm-level variables, and rolling-regression betas, even when the true betas are...