We survey the literature on stock return forecasting, highlighting the challenges faced by forecasters as well as strategies for improving return forecasts. We focus on U.S. equity premium forecastability and illustrate key issues via an empirical application based on updated data. Some studies...

The literature on stock return predictability has identified macroeconomic and technical predictors that when combined, leads to out-of-sample outperformance relative to the historical mean null. This paper investigates a new method for aggregating information beyond using forecast combination...

We examine the relationship between the tonality of news flow and the cross section of expected stock returns. We use a comprehensive definition of media coverage that includes both financial newspapers and mass media, represented by TV broadcasts. Using the total news flow with positive and...

This paper examines the cross-sectional properties of stock return forecasts based on Fama-MacBeth regressions using all firms contained in the STOXX Europe 600 index during the September 1999-December 2018 period. Our estimation approach is strictly out-of-sample, mimicking an investor who...

We examine the post-IPO excess stock returns of hospitality firms from 1996 to 2012 and find underperformance relative to the market on average. However, there are large differences in returns and some firms significantly outperform. We demonstrate that a substantial portion of this variation...

This paper provides new evidence on the pricing of market skewness risk by incorporating investor sentiment in the relation between sensitivity to innovations in implied market skewness and expected stock returns. Using both univariate and multivariate specifications, we conduct an extensive...

We provide new evidence on investor disagreement based on a model where investors observe public information but agree to disagree on its interpretation. Specifically, we measure firm-level investor disagreement by the intraday volume-volatility elasticity around corporate news announcement. A...

Even in large equity markets, the dividend-price ratio is significantly related with the growth of future dividends. In order to uncover this relationship, we use monthly dividends and a mixed data sampling technique which allows us to cope with within-year seasonality. We reduce the effect of...

We identify all return leader-follower pairs among individual stocks using Granger causality regressions. Thus-identified leaders can reliably predict their followers' returns out of sample, and the return predictability works at the level of individual stocks rather than industries. Our results...

In this paper we investigate the predictive power of cross-sectional volatility, skewness and kurtosis for future stock returns. Adding to the work of Maio (2016), who finds cross-sectional volatility to forecast a decline in the equity premium with high predictive power in-sample as well as...