This paper conducts a comprehensive study on predicting the cross section of Chinese stock market returns with a large panel of 75 individual firm characteristics. We use not only the traditional Fama-MacBeth regression, but also “big-data” econometric methods: principal component analysis...

We propose an employee sentiment index, which complements investor sentiment and manager sentiment indices, and find that high employee sentiment predicts a subsequent low market return, significant both in- and out-of-sample. The predictability of the employee sentiment index can also deliver...

We find that investor attention proxies proposed in the literature collectively have a common component that has significant power in predicting stock market risk premium, both in-sample and out-of-sample. This common component is well extracted by using partial least squares, scaled principal...

We propose an employee sentiment index, complementing investor sentiment and manager sentiment indices, and find that high employee sentiment predicts low monthly (weekly) market returns significantly both in- and out-of-sample. The predictability can also deliver sizable economic gains for...