I build a dynamic capital structure model that demonstrates how business-cycle variations in expected growth rates, economic uncertainty, and risk premia influence firms' financing and default policies. Countercyclical fluctuations in risk prices, default probabilities, and default losses arise...

We derive an option-pricing formula from recursive preference and estimate rare disaster probability. The new options-pricing formula applies to far-out-of-the money put options on the stock market when disaster risk dominates, the size distribution of disasters follows a power law, and the...

Ex ante (expected) average equity market correlation is linked to the differential correlation dynamics of growth and value firms, as well as the value premium. It predicts returns on the value factor, returns of growth firms, and the changes in growth options within an economy for horizons up...

We construct risk-neutral return probability distributions from S&P 500 options data over the decade 2003 to 2013, separable into pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis regimes. The pre-crisis period is characterized by increasing realized and, especially, option-implied returns. This translates...

We decompose asset growth into external and internal growth and construct the expected investment growth measures based on different components. The expected external investment growth predicts future stock return positively and subsumes the expected investment growth premium controlling for...

This paper proposes a time series decomposition of book-to-market ratio (BM) into a trend component and an innovation component (I_BM). Under the framework of stock valuation with growth options, we demonstrate that I_BM is negatively related to the change of growth options and therefore...

High (low) quality stocks generate anomalously high (low) returns above and beyond expected returns based on betas, market sizes, valuations, and momentum. We provide a comprehensive overview of commonly used quality definitions and test their predictive power for stock returns. We show that...

We propose a novel measure of investment plans, namely, expected investment growth (EIG) and find stocks with high EIG outperform stocks with low EIG by 17% per annum. This premium can be generated in a neoclassical model with the investment plan friction, in which a firm's expected returns...