The equity risk premium is the price of risk in equity markets, and it is a key input in estimating costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation. Given its importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in practice. We begin this...

We interrogate 140 years of macrofinancial data from three directions. The first approach pays attention to the slow buildup of financial imbalances that threaten financial stability and isolates medium-term movements in credit and property prices to identify national financial cycles. We show...

This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic news announcements (MNA) on the stock market. Stocks exhibit a strong positive response to major MNA: 1 standard deviation of MNA surprise causes 11-25 bps higher returns. This response is highly time-varying and is weaker during periods of high...

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...

A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns....

Initial Gross Domestic Product (GDP) announcements are important economic signals that convey information on the state of the economy but contain substantial estimation error. We investigate how GDP estimation errors affect firms' real decisions and profitability. Consistent with theoretical...

To enrich the debate about the effectiveness of sovereign wealth funds, this paper explores the relationship between real government spending and real oil export revenues for a sample of six countries. This exploration uses an econometric analysis based on time-series data and its purpose is to...

This study investigates the effects of firm-level political risk on corporate investments and operating efficiencies for industrially diversified and focused firms. Using firm-level political risk data from Hassan et al.(2019), we document that both political risk and diversification lead to...

This article reviews the impact of intellectual property (IP) protection on foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational enterprises (MNEs) in developing countries. Applying different panel data techniques to a newly-created comprehensive FDI/IP dataset of 31 Swiss MNEs investing into 53...

I establish that inflation risk is priced in the cross section of stock returns: Stocks that have low returns during inflationary times command a risk premium. I estimate a market price of inflation risk that is comparable in magnitude to the price of risk for the aggregate market. Inflation is...