We analyze a firm's choice between dividend payments and stock repurchases under heterogeneous beliefs and the subsequent long-term stock return performance of firms adopting the two forms of payout. Firm insiders, owning a certain fraction of its equity, choose between paying out its cash...

This study examines the relation between aggregate volatility risk and the cross-section of stock returns in Australia. We use a stock's sensitivity to innovations in the ASX200 implied volatility (VIX) as a proxy for aggregate volatility risk. Consistent with theoretical predictions, aggregate...

In this note we document interactive relations between the excess volatility and the momentum effect in the cross-section of stock returns over the sample periods of 1963-1989, 1990-2010 and 1963-2010, along the line explored lately in Wang and Ma (2014). The nature of interactive relations...

This paper investigates whether news suggestive of irrationality within financial markets have an impact on stock returns. We construct a lexicon of words for 'market irrationality' and score daily news articles based on the number and proportion of words they contain from the lexicon. We find...

The prevailing view of implied volatility comovements, IVC, defined as the correlation between a firm's implied volatility and the market's implied volatility, is that they indicate the presence of systematic volatility risk to the firm's investors. We take a different stance and conjecture that...

The idiosyncratic volatility anomaly, as first documented in Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006), has received considerable attention in the literature. In this paper, we examine the pervasiveness of the anomaly in various stock samples and provide evidence towards distinguishing potential...

There has been a long debate on the interpretation of idiosyncratic return variation. We inform this debate by examining the extent to which stock return synchronicity is associated with the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) in China. We find that firms with higher synchronicity exhibit...

Recent empirical evidence has shown that the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and a stock's expected return depends on the pricing of the stock: it is negative among overvalued stocks and positive among undervalued ones. We provide both theoretical and numerical evidence that this...

This paper investigates whether realized and implied volatilities of individual stocks can predict the cross-sectional variation in expected returns. Although the levels of volatilities from the physical and risk-neutral distributions cannot predict future returns, there is a significant...

This paper uses the volatility surface data from options contracts to document a strong, robust, and positive cross-sectional relation between risk-neutral skewness (RNS) and subsequent stock returns. The differential return between high and low RNS stocks amounts to 0.17% per week....