Following seminal works of Knight (1921) and Ellsberg (1961), we distinguish uncertainty from risk and examine the impact of aggregate uncertainty on return dynamics of size and book-to-market ratio sorted portfolios. Using VVIX as a proxy for aggregate uncertainty and controlling for market...

We provide strong support for the underappreciated expected earnings hypothesis of negative correlation between aggregate stock returns and earnings (Sadka and Sadka (2009); Choi, Kalay, and Sadka (2016)). For the 1970 to 2000 period studied by Kothari, Lewellen, and Warner (2006), our powerful...

We propose a new approach for estimating expected returns on individual stocks from a large number of firm characteristics. We treat expected returns as latent variables and apply the partial least squares (PLS) estimator that filters them out from the characteristics under an assumption that...

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...