The paper shows that controlling for the aggregate volatility risk factor eliminates the puzzling negative relation between variability of trading activity and future abnormal returns. I also find that variability of other measures of liquidity and liquidity risk is largely unrelated to expected...

The paper shows that lottery-like stocks are hedges against unexpected increases in market volatility. The loading on the aggregate volatility risk factor explains low returns to stocks with high maximum returns in the past (Bali, Cakici, and Whitelaw, 2011) and high expected skewness (Boyer,...

The paper discovers that firm complexity is negatively priced in cross-section. High/low-complexity conglomerates have 35-50/20-28 bp per month more negative five-factor Fama and French (2015) alphas than single-segment firms, and this effect is stronger in subsamples with low institutional...

Firms with lower profitability have lower expected returns because such firms perform better than expected when market volatility increases. The better-than-expected performance arises because unprofitable firms are distressed and volatile, their equity resembles a call option on the assets, and...

The idiosyncratic volatility effect of Ang et al. (2006) is robust to restricting the sample to NYSE firms (once proper listing indicator is used) and to excluding from the sample small, illiquid, and low-price stocks. The idiosyncratic volatility effect is also unlikely to stem from the...