Understanding the factors that drive the stock market is more than an academic exercise. With a framework to understanding what that drives the overall market, business leaders are positioned to drive value their own businesses. While driving increases in shareholder value is one of the most...

I propose a neoclassical production economy with costly external financing, partial investment irreversibility, and endogenous investment/financing decisions to rationalize and quantify the well-documented interaction between the book-to-market equity effect and the financial leverage effect in...

Investors have to be offered risk premiums to invest in risky assets. These risk premiums take different forms in different asset markets: equity risk premiums (ERP) in stock markets, default spreads in bond markets and real asset premiums in other asset markets. These premiums have their roots...

The Equity risk-premium and volatility puzzles: Is it possible to have a high-equity premium and a low risk-free rate, and a high volatile stock return, have received a great deal of attention but beyond this, the fundamental issues are the following: What are the economic representations that...

The existing real options literature explains the value premium as a consequence of either operating leverage raising risk in low-demand states or industry-wide investment lowering risk in high-demand states. This paper presents a simple model in which a value premium arises solely from capacity...

Feedback from stock prices to cash flows occurs because information revealed by firms' stock prices influences the actions of competitors. We explore the implications of feedback within a noisy rational expectations setting with publicly listed and private firms. In our setting, stock prices are...

Through the interaction between financial constraints and R&D, I study two asset pricing puzzles: mixed evidence on the financial constraints-return relation and the positive R&D-return relation. Unlike capital investment, R&D is more inflexible. A financially constrained R&D-intensive rm is...

The value premium is the empirical observation that low market/book “value” stocks have higher returns than high market/book “growth” stocks. In this paper, we report evidence that there is a value premium for firms in financial distress despite the anomalous observation that firms in...

This paper contains the statistics of a survey about the Risk-Free Rate (RF) and the Market Risk Premium (MRP) used in 2017 for 41 countries. We got answers for 68 countries, but we only report the results for 41 countries with more than 25 answers. The average (RF) used in 2017 was smaller than...

The term “equity premium puzzle” was coined in 1985 by economists Rajnish Mehra and Edward C. Prescott. The equity premium puzzle in considered one of the most significant questions in finance. A number of papers have explored the fundamental questions of why the premium exists and has not...