This study uses 469,816 monthly observations of US public firms for the period 1990-2018 to document a strong positive relationship between short-term changes in financial distress risk and future stock price crashes. This result is economically significant as a one interquartile increase of the...

We study the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the distribution of stock returns for an international sample. Firms with a high level of CSR generally exhibit superior stock price synchronicity in the markets of Europe, Japan, and the United States. In particular, we...

We examine whether corporate accessibility to outside market participants can mitigate stock price crash risk in a weak public information environment. We measure accessibility by assessing whether outside investors can assess and communicate with firms via public communication channels (e.g.,...

Factor investing entails exposure to ESG risk. How big is the exposure to this risk ? Is this exposure rewarded by the market ? We investigate the relevance of ESG risk for a cross section (15) of market anomalies long-short portfolios. The Environmental dimension of ESG is consistently relevant...

This paper employs the ZCAPM asset pricing model of Liu, Kolari, and Huang (2018) to show that momentum returns are highly related to market risk arising from return dispersion (RD). Cross-sectional tests show that momentum risk loadings and RD risk loadings are similarly priced in momentum...

We find that when measured in terms of dollar-turnover, and once beta-neutralised and Low-Vol neutralised, the Size Effect is alive and well. With a long term t-stat of 5.1, the “Cold-Minus-Hot” (CMH) anomaly is certainly not less significant than other well-known factors such as Value or...

In this paper, we combine modern portfolio theory and option pricing theory so that a trader who takes a position in a European option contract and the underlying assets can construct an optimal portfolio such that at the moment of the contract's maturity the contract is perfectly hedged. We...

This paper investigates the performance and characteristics of survivor stocks in the S&P 500 index. Using both in-sample and out-of-sample comparisons, survivor stocks outperformed this market index by a considerable margin. Relative to other S&P 500 index companies, survivor stocks tend to be...

Floods and droughts represent an embedded monsoon factor impacting the Indian economy. Evaluating monsoon risk based on rainfall index metrics could help design appropriate alternative risk transfer products. This study proposes a new set of rainfall indices that can be used to explore the...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...