We examine the puzzling negative relation between financial distress risk and the cross-section of expected returns. We … most recent distress risk shocks to which investors initially underreact, causing temporary overpricing of distressed … stocks. In the long run, the relation between distress risk and returns reflects the positive risk premium as distress risk …

firms and concludes that both the size and book-to-market effects are related to default risk. For example, small firms earn … higher return than big firms only if they have higher default risk and value stocks earn higher returns than growth stocks if … their default risk is high. In this paper we use a more advanced compound option pricing model for the computation of …