Optimal investment of firms implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity (two major components of the marginal benefit of...

This paper examines the performance of two commonly applied bankruptcy prediction models, the accounting ratio-based Altman Z-Score model, and the structural Distance to Default model which currently underlies Morningstar's Financial Health Grade for public companies (Morningstar 2008)....

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the lack of analyst forecasts for half of all firms. Hou, van Dijk, and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts in order to compute ICC. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than...

This study provides empirical evidence for the efficacy of deriving firms' earnings forecasts from predictions of the complete, conditional probability density function (pdf). Relative to cross-sectional earnings forecasts based on OLS regressions, improvements of accuracy, bias and measures for...

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the lack of analyst forecasts for half of all firms. Hou, van Dijk, and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts in order to compute ICC. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than...

I demonstrate that much of the time series variation in the credit spread on high yield bonds is attributable to changes in the “credit risk premium” rather than changes in expected default losses. The credit risk premium is the expected excess return investors earn from bearing default risk...