We document that the first and third cross-sectional moments of corporate bond returns significantly and positively predict future stock market returns both in- and out-of-sample. The predictability emerges from informed bond trading and gradual diffusion of information. Particularly, the...

Using a large hand-collected dataset, we provide novel evidence on the additional information embedded in the designs and graphs of financial reports. We find that firms that add graphic financial reports experience a positive 2.7% abnormal returns in the following 3 to 6 months. The finding...

This paper constructs a manager sentiment index based on the aggregated textual tone of corporate financial disclosures. We find that manager sentiment is a strong negative predictor of future aggregate stock market returns, with monthly in-sample and out-of-sample R2 of 9.75% and 8.38%,...

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, 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 propose a novel measure of the ex-ante commodity downside-risk premium (CDP) for each commodity based on a term structure model of commodity futures. Our theory-based CDP, capturing forward-looking information in the futures markets, outperforms well-known characteristics in explaining the...

We analyze the joint out-of-sample predictive ability of a comprehensive set of 299 firm characteristics for cross-sectional stock returns. We develop a cross-sectional out-of-sample R2 statistic that provides an informative measure of the accuracy of cross-sectional return forecasts in terms of...

Stock market predictability is of considerable interest in both academic research and investment practice. Ross (2005) provides a simple and elegant upper bound on the predictive regression R-squared that R^2 = (1 R_f)^2 Var(m) for a given asset pricing model with kernel m, where R_f is the...

We find that expected return is related to trading volume positively among underpriced stocks but negatively among overpriced stocks. As such, trading volume amplifies mispricing. Our results are robust to alternative mispricing and trading volume measures, alternative portfolio formation...

We provide a short and selected review of the vast literature on cross-section predictability. We focus on the state of art methods used to forecast the cross-section of stock returns with major predictors and are primarily interested in the ideas, methods, and their applications. To understand...