Assuming that risk premiums are determined by failure risk, we present a stylized model of interactions among risk-proxy variables, external financing, and stock returns in which a common mispricing factor, involving operating profit and external financing, drives the following five asset...

Interest rate changes typically affect the value of equities. However, the slow movement of investment capital may delay the transmission of this information from interest rate markets to stocks. Using a century of data from sixty countries, we demonstrate that yield curve shifts predict future...

Due to arbitrage risk asymmetries, the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns is positive (negative) among overpriced (underpriced) stocks. We offer a new active anomaly-selection strategy that capitalizes on this effect. To this end, we consider eleven equity anomalies in...

We conduct a comprehensive asset pricing analysis for the U.S. property/liability insurance industry using monthly data from 1988 to 2015. We find that state-of-the-art models such as the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model cannot explain the returns of property/liability insurance stocks...

What is the cross-sectional relationship between financial leverage and expected equity returns? How is the empirical relationship associated with firm's financial decisions? This paper investigates the potential explanations for the flatness relation between financial leverage and expected...

We examine the pricing performance of various measures of dealer risk appetite. We construct a novel measure of risk appetite that captures the provision of leverage to the clients of broker-dealer firms. We also construct a factor mimicking portfolio that tracks shocks to the leverage of...

We uncover significant asymmetric effects of realized jump risks on conditional equity premium. Negative or ``bad'' (positive or ``good'') jumps predict a rising (falling) near-term equity premium. The signed jump risk measures remain statistically significant even when we control for the...

This paper documents a significant risk premium for financial intermediation risk in the cross section of equity returns. Firms that borrow from highly levered financial intermediaries have on average 4% higher expected returns relative to firms with low-leverage lenders. This difference cannot...

The Asset pricing literature has produced hundreds of risk factor candidates aimed at explaining the cross-section of expected excess returns, although risk factors which are in fact capable of providing independent information remains an open question. Appling a sparse model, Kozak, Nagel, and...

The Factor Zoo phenomenon calls for answers as to which risk factors are in fact capable of providing independent information on the cross-section of expected excess returns, while considering that asset-pricing literature has produced hundreds of candidates. In this paper, we propose a new...