Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

It has been documented that vertical customer-supplier links between industries are the basis for strong cross-sectional stock return predictability (Menzly and Ozbas (2010)).We show that robust predictability also arises from horizontal links between industries, i.e., from the fact that...