As opposed to the “low beta low risk” convention, we show that low beta stocks are illiquid and exposed to high liquidity risk. After adjusting for liquidity risk, low beta stocks no longer outperform high beta stocks. Although investors who “bet against beta” earn a significant beta...

We conjecture that leverage has the potential to explain the positive relation between stock returns and gross profitability (Novy-Marx, 2013). At the firm level, we show that the profitability premium becomes insignificant for almost zero-leverage firms (Strebulaev and Yang, 2013). At the...

Shareholder litigation risk, measured using the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in 23 states from 1989 to 2005, has a negative effect on stock returns. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that, following the passage of the laws, firms have lower stock returns....

We examine the impact of default risk on the market skewness risk effect that stocks with low market skewness risk outperform stocks with high risk documented in the previous literature. We find that the effect is strong among large, growth, and low default risk stocks, but vanishes among small,...