Prior literature in accounting and financial economics measures asset growth as year-over-year growth in total assets. Such growth estimates are upward biased when firms engage in mergers and acquisitions. We decompose asset growth into merger-related and organic growth components, and find that...

Møller and Rangvid (2015) report that economic growth at the end of the year is a strong predictor of future stock returns for the post-WWII period, whereas economic growth during the rest of the year does not. Revisiting these results with an extended period 1926-2020, we find that this...

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...

A bottom-up measure of aggregate investment plans, namely, aggregate expected investment growth (AEIG) can negatively predict market returns. At the one-year horizon, the adjusted in-sample R-square is 18.2% and the out-of-sample R-square is 14.4%. The return predictive power is robust after...

Consistent with neoclassical models with investment lags, we find that a bottom-up measure of aggregate investment plans, namely, aggregate expected investment growth, negatively predicts future stock market returns. with an adjusted in-sample R2 of 18.5% and an out-of-sample R2 of 16.3% at the...

This paper shows that firm growth potential – representing a firm's yet-unexercised growth opportunities – is associated with option overpricing and low future delta-hedged option returns. We provide an explanation of this phenomenon based on the idea that retail investors exert buying...

Global economic growth at the end of the year strongly predicts returns from a wide spectrum of international assets, such as global, regional, and individual-country stocks, FX, and commodities. Global economic growth at other times of the year does not predict international returns. Low growth...