Prior research uses the basic one-period European call-option pricing model to compute default measures for individual firms and concludes that both the size and book-to-market effects are related to default risk. For example, small firms earn higher return than big firms only if they have...

This paper provides an extensive international analysis of the cross-sectional return predictive power of a variety of firm-level profitability measures, calculated from different combinations of measures of earnings and scaling variables. We show that this cross-sectional predictive relation is...

In this paper, we show that the book-to-market decomposition described in Fama-French (2008) significantly improves the predictive power of the estimation for an important emerging market, viz, Chinese shares. Second, we show that this improvement comes mainly from the change in book equity and...