Because uncertainty is high in bad times, investors find it harder to assess firm prospects and, hence, should value analyst output more. However, higher uncertainty makes analysts' tasks harder so it is unclear if analyst output is more valuable in bad times. We find that, in bad times, analyst...

Hou and Moskowitz (2005) use the stock price delay in reflecting market-wide information to measure market frictions each individual firm faces. In this study, to better understand how the price formation process is affected by the business cycle, we examine the relation between changes in the...

We find that procyclical stocks, whose returns comove with business cycles, earn higher average returns than countercyclical stocks. We use almost a three-quarter century of real GDP growth expectations from economists' surveys to determine forecasted economic states. This approach largely...

Broker-dealer leverage has recently proven to be strongly procyclical, exhibiting impressive explanatory power for a large cross-section of asset returns in the US. In this paper we add empirical evidence to this finding, showing that European and German broker-dealers actively manage their...

Trust companies generate leverage cycle dynamics by intermediating less regulated credit to the financial markets in China. We find that the leverage factor constructed from trust companies can explain the time-series and cross-sectional asset returns. The leverage factor derived from securities...

Canonical intermediary asset pricing models assume a representative intermediary with an SDF linear in its leverage. Yet the leverage of broker-dealers is procyclical whereas the leverage of banking holding companies is countercyclical. I propose an empirically testable heterogeneous...