My dissertation aims at understanding the economic determinants of the cross-section of equity returns. It contains three chapters. Chapter One constructs a dynamic general equilibrium production economy to explicitly link expected stock returns to firm characteristics such as firm size and the...

Self-service technology (SST) has been widely adopted by service oriented companies in different settings, such as hotel, restaurant, and airport. Although customers are less hesitant about using SST nowadays than before, how to increase customer satisfaction and repeat patronage remains an...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms optimally adjusttheir capital investment in response to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-ratehypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increaseswith the...

We consider the stochastic volatility model with regime switching. We model the unobserved regimesas a continuous-time latent or hidden Markov chain, with exponential waiting times. This allows us to identify the hidden regimes and compare the posterior probability of changes in regimes with...

Brands have significant impact on consumers perception and choices of a product in both online and offline environments. In this work, we investigate the effects of brand logos, brand awareness, brand image, brand knowledge (composed of brand awareness and brand image) and brand relationship...