Exploiting the staggered establishment of public audit oversight boards (POBs) worldwide and employing a difference-in-differences methodology, we find that patents and patent citations increase significantly following the implementation of public audit oversight. This is especially so in client...

Several studies document a robust negative association between net external financing and average stock returns, which is referred to as the external financing effect. Using total asset growth as a comprehensive measure of overall corporate investment and total profitability gross of R&D...

We measure ex-ante expectation errors by identifying sporadic versus persistent total asset growth ex-ante. Corporate profitability of high (low) asset-growth firms remains inferior (superior) after temporary asset expansion (contraction), hence ex-ante expectation errors are high. Corporate...

We empirically evaluate the predictions of the mispricing hypothesis with limits-to-arbitrage suggested by Shleifer and Vishny (1997) and the q-theory with investment frictions proposed by Li and Zhang (2010) on the negative relation between asset growth and average stock returns. We conduct...

Based on U.S. stock returns from 1973 to 2015, this study found that the asset growth anomaly does not seem to be pervasive and investable. The trading strategy is robust only among a tiny portion of the equity market in terms of both number of stocks and capitalization. In addition to...

In this paper, we investigate the relation between accounting accruals and abnormal corporate investments and if the accrual-based anomaly documented by Sloan (1996) is distinct from the investment-based anomaly documented by Titman, Wei, and Xie (2004). Our results indicate that abnormal...

Macroeconomic risks only partially capture the profitability premium, while adding a misvaluation factor based on investor sentiment helps explain a substantial amount of it. The profitability premium mainly exists in firms whose market valuations are inconsistent with their profitability and...

In this paper, we hypothesize that if the negative relationship between asset growth and stock returns is due to mispricing, it should be more pronounced and more persistent when there are more severe limits to arbitrage. The empirical evidence supports our hypothesis. Our findings are not due...

Several studies have documented that companies that increase capital investments or grow their total assets subsequently earn substantially lower risk-adjusted returns. While some studies attribute this phenomenon to investors' initial underreactions to overinvestments pursued by managers who...

We examine short sellers' use of textual information in annual reports for shorting activities. We find that more uncertainty and negative words in annual reports are associated with greater abnormal shorting volume. Short selling motivated by textual information negatively predicts stock price...