During decades, tests have been developed to verify whether the beta is the best tool to explain the returns of securities on the stock market. Moreover, the value of the beta and its coefficient of determination (R-squared) vary with different parameters used for estimating the beta. In this...

The Market Portfolio is not an efficient portfolio. There are many evidences that tell us that: the equal weighted indexes have beaten their market-value weighted indexes for many years, many easy-to-build portfolios (some “smart-beta”, “multifactors”) have beaten market-value weighted...

Regulators of many countries try to find the “true” WACC of Electricity, Gas, Water… activities. All their documents have in common a main confusion: they do not differentiate among expected, required, historical, and regulator allowed returns, which are 4 very different concepts. Most of...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is theoretically incomplete in its demand-side focus, risk-averse investors, and internally inconsistent homogeneous beliefs; is not conclusively supported empirically; and yet it legitimizes a notion that investors can earn higher returns by bearing...

A principal-components analysis demonstrates that common earnings factors explain a substantial portion of rm-level earnings variation, implying earnings shocks have substantial systematic components and are not almost fully diversifiable as prior literature has concluded. Furthermore, the...

This paper examines to what extent stock market anomalies are driven by firm fundamentals in an investment-based asset pricing framework. Using Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), we estimate a two-capital q-model to match firm-level stock returns, instead of matching portfolio-level...

We are interested in the effect of capital income taxes upon security prices when investors face locally segmented stock markets and a global bond market. Therefore, we analyze an equilibrium model of an economy with binomial uncertainty, an exogenous risk-free interest rate and a representative...

I review the empirical literature on word of mouth (WOM) among investors. I begin with an outline of the empirical challenges that WOM research faces and possible strategies to overcome those challenges. I then discuss recent studies on WOM among retail and institutional investors. The research...

We show that the stock market downturns of 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 have very different proximate causes. The early 2000's saw a large increase in the discount rates applied to profits by rational investors, while the late 2000's saw a decrease in rational expectations of future profits. We reach...