Interested in fundamental analysis and inspired by Bartram and Grinblatt (2018 & 2021), we apply linear regression (LR) and tree-based machine learning (ML) methods to estimate monthly peer-implied fair values of European stocks from 21 accounting variables. Comparing LR and ML models, we...

While previous work suggests two competing explanations for the effect of labor market regulation on firms' demand for debt, our results reconcile both the “strategic use of debt” and “financial flexibility” view. Exploiting staggered changes to labor laws in 28 OECD countries, we find...

While previous work suggests two competing explanations for the effect of labor market regulation on firms' demand for debt, our results reconcile both the “strategic use of debt” and “financial flexibility” view. Exploiting staggered changes to labor laws in 28 OECD countries, we find...

This paper shows that low-risk stocks significantly outperform high-risk stocks in the local China A shares market. The main driver of this low-risk anomaly is volatility, and not beta. A Fama-French style VOL factor is not explained by the Fama-French-Carhart factors, and has the strongest...

Despite its theoretical appeal, Markowitz mean-variance portfolio optimization is plagued by practical issues. It is especially difficult to obtain reliable estimates of a stock's expected return. Recent research has therefore focused on minimum volatility portfolio optimization, which...