Movements in the value of corporate assets are justified by changes in expected future cash flow. The appropriate measure of cash flow for valuing assets is net payout, which is the sum of dividends, interest, and net repurchases of equity and debt. When discount rates are low and equity...

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

This paper reconsiders the effect of investor sentiment on stock prices. Using survey-based sentiment indicators from Germany and the US we confirm previous findings of predictability at intermediate time horizons. The main contribution of our paper is that we also analyze the immediate price...

We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

We propose a new measure of the expected variance risk premium that is based on a forecast of the conditional variance from a GARCH-MIDAS model. We find that the new measure has strong predictive ability for future U.S. aggregate stock market returns and rationalize this result by showing that...

The 1987 market crash was associated with a dramatic and permanent steepening of the implied volatility curve for equity index options, despite minimal changes in aggregate consumption. We explain these events within a general equilibrium framework in which expected endowment growth and economic...

This paper examines the long-run dynamics and the cyclical structure of the US stock market using fractional integration techniques, specifically a version of the tests of Robinson (1994a) which allows for unit (or fractional) roots both at the zero (long-run) and at the cyclical frequencies. We...

This paper empirically examines the theoretically ambivalent relationship between socially responsible investing (SRI) and stock performance. It extends the existing literature by considering both the US and the entire European stock markets as well as by using consistent world-wide corporate...

The capital-asset-pricing model (CAPM) is one of the most popular methods of financial market analysis. But, evidence of the poor empirical performance of the CAPM has accumulated in the literature. For example, based on their empirical results regarding the relation between market Beta and...

In this paper we propose exact likelihood-based mean-variance efficiency tests of the market portfolio in the context of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), allowing for a wide class of error distributions which include normality as a special case. These tests are developed in the framework of...