Dividends have long been perceived as a way for firms to reward investors. However, managers are likely to inflate return on equity (ROE) by paying out dividends because doing so reduces owners’ equity. We utilize performance-vesting equity incentive plans that adopt ROE as the performance...

This study aims to test and analyze the effect of capital structure, profitability, investment opportunity set, firm value, earnings per share, and dividend policy, on stock returns. Our research uses regression analysis to determine and analyze the influence of independent variables on...

This paper studies the sociological influence of religion on the risk and return in the financial markets with particular context of Islamic finance. The paper builds a theoretical model to show how intermediaries serve their customers' religious needs by creating innovative Islamic financial...

We propose a risk-based firm-type explanation on why stocks of firms with high relative short interest (RSI) have lower future returns. We argue that these firms have negative alphas because they are a hedge against expected aggregate volatility risk. Consistent with this argument, we show that...

The paper explains why firms with high dispersion of analyst forecasts earn low future returns. These firms beat the CAPM in periods of increasing aggregate volatility and thereby provide a hedge against aggregate volatility risk. The aggregate volatility risk factor can explain the abnormal...

We take a simple q-theory model and ask how well it can explain external financing anomalies, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our central insight is that optimal investment is an important driving force of these anomalies. The model simultaneously reproduces procyclical equity issuance...

We derive and test q-theory implications for cross-sectional stock returns. Under constant returns to scale, stock returns equal levered investment returns, which are tied directly to firm characteristics. When we use GMM to match average levered investment returns to average observed stock...

We derive and test q-theory implications for cross-sectional stock returns. Under constant returns to scale, stock returns equal levered investment returns, which are tied directly to firm characteristics. When we use GMM to match average levered investment returns to average observed stock...

Using a comprehensive dataset of hedge fund 13F filings, we analyze hedge fund trading from 1998-2010 to determine if investor redemptions cause fire sales and stock market disruptions. We find evidence of hedge fund fire sales in the two quarters with the worst stock market performance. During...

This paper investigates forecasts of long-term volatility for the fast-growing field of long-short factor strategies in an extensive in- and out-of-sample framework. More in detail, the study follows previous authors by empirically comparing various forecast configurations to provide guidance to...