Optimal investment of firms implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity (two major components of the marginal benefit of...

We propose a new asset-pricing framework in which all securities' signals are used to predict each individual return. While the literature focuses on each security's own- signal predictability, assuming an equal strength across securities, our framework is flexible and includes...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

We examine whether real-time return forecasts are valuable to an investor looking to allocate their portfolio across a wide selection of countries. We expand the Sum-of-Parts (SoP) method for forecasting stock returns to an international setup by adding FX returns as an additional component. We...

I propose to forecast the market returns through its constituents. In contrast to the voluminous literature that concentrates on the predictive power of aggregate cross-sectional or macroeconomic predictors, I analyze the return predictability of sub-portfolios that compose the market portfolio....

Divergence in investor beliefs is an important driver of the negative relation between option trading volume and future stock returns. We find a strong negative relation between disagreement-based option trades and future stock returns, and this relation is markedly amplified when the underlying...

The Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index purports to measure irrational investor sentiment, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is designed to largely reflect fundamentals. Removing this fundamental component from the Baker and Wurgler index creates an index of investor...

We examine the predictive effect of sentiment on the cross-section of stock returns across different economic states. The degree of mispricing and the subsequent price correction can be different between economic expansion and recession because of the limits of arbitrage and short sale...

In contrast to previous studies, we redefine the category of "rationality" from the perspective of investors' pursuit for wealth maximization. Using the data from Chinese stock market, this paper studies the impact of rational and irrational sentiment on asset returns from short-term to...