We use earnings forecasts from a cross-sectional model to proxy for cash flow expectations and estimate the implied cost of capital (ICC) for a large sample of firms over 1968-2008. The earnings forecasts generated by the cross-sectional model are superior to analysts' forecasts in terms of...

We investigate the joint hypothesis that a) tax expense contains information about core profitability that is incremental to reported earnings and b) that information is reflected in stock prices with a delay. We find that seasonally-differenced quarterly tax expense, our proxy for tax expense...

High-frequency trading has become a dominant force in the U.S. capital market, accounting for over 70% of dollar trading volume. This study examines the implication of high-frequency trading for stock price volatility and price discovery. I find that high-frequency trading is positively...

This paper exploits information contained in cross-sectional PEG ratios to extract estimates of the market's expectations for aggregate returns and economic fundamentals. By combining the loglinear present-valuation model and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) logic, we establish a theoretic...

Prior research demonstrates that investors respond differently to earnings surprises that are part of a string of consecutive earnings increases or surprises than to those that are not. To shed light on who values these patterns, I compare trading responses of small and large traders to earnings...

We examine how the information produced by analysts when they initiate coverage contributes to the mix of firm-specific, industry-, and market-wide information available about the firm. We hypothesize that the first analyst to initiate coverage provides low cost market and industry information...

We show that analyst coverage proxies contain information about expected returns. We decompose analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components using a simple characteristic-based model and show that firms with abnormally high analyst coverage subsequently outperform firms with abnormally...

We extend prior research examining the relation between aggregate recommendation changes and future returns by documenting that this relation varies over time as a function of the predictability of future earnings growth. When industry-level earnings growth is more predictable, we find that...

Predicted stock issuers (PSIs) are firms with expected “high-investment and low-profit” (HILP) profiles that earn unusually low returns. We carefully document important features of PSI firms to provide insights on the economic mechanism behind the HILP phenomenon. Top-PSI firms are...

We establish a link between firms managing investors' performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels predictably earn lower returns before, and higher returns...