This paper investigates the impact of debt covenant protection on the cross section of equity returns with a firm-level covenant index and four sub-indices. We find that firms with weaker covenant protection (lower covenant index levels) earn significantly higher risk-adjusted equity returns...

The mean-semivariance CAPM strongly outperforms the traditional mean-variance CAPM in terms of its ability to explain the cross-section of US stock returns. If regular beta is replaced by downside beta, the traditional risk-return relationship is restored. The downside betas of low-beta stocks...

This paper shows that firms talking less about the future in their annual reports generate positive abnormal returns of about 5% annually. I measure how much companies talk about the future in their annual 10-K reports by the frequency of the verbs will, shall, and going to. The evidence favors...

Stock pledged loans have become prevalent among large shareholders of listed firms in China. The largest shareholder pledges a greater fraction of her holdings as collateral for credit when the firm is in growth industries, less profitable, not state owned, and has higher leverage. Stock...

This paper investigates the relationship between corporate culture and the comovement of stock returns in US publicly listed firms. To do so, we conduct a textual analysis of firms’ 10-K reports and employ the bag-of-words methodology to capture a firm’s corporate culture based on the...

We extract individual and company profiles from BoardEx to identify the executive board network and investigate the relationship between social links and asset returns. Our study documents a cross-predictability effect on returns for firms linked through executive board members. Specifically,...

Ethical investments have become increasingly popular over the past years. Ethical funds restrict their investment based on environmental, social and/or ethical criteria. Prior research on the performance of ethical versus non-ethical funds yields mixed results. This paper investigates the...

Measuring risk in the stock market context is one of the key challenges of modern finance. Despite of the substantial significance of the topic to investors and market regulators, there is a controversy over what risk factors should be used to price the assets or to determine the cost of...

The relation between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns is currently a topic of debate in the academic literature. So far the evidence regarding the relation is mixed. This study aims to investigate the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns in the Indian stock...

This study examines the sensitivity of the Thai stock market to nominal and real interest rate, and exchange rate risks during January 2004 and December 2015 using quantile regression. The analysis focuses on sectoral level and one main index in the stock market. The empirical results show that...