I develop a new asset pricing theory that bridges two seemingly unrelated pricing effects from separate literatures: (1) the negative relationship between ex-ante return skewness and expected returns and (2) the negative relationship between dispersion in financial analysts' earnings forecasts...

Earnings announcements present a clear risk to investors and, under rational asset pricing theory, such risk should be consistently priced in stocks. However, we find that stocks with high earnings announcement risk earn significantly higher returns only during months when firms have earnings or...