Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

The q-factor model shows strong explanatory power and largely summarizes the cross section of average stock returns. In particular, the q-factor model fully subsumes the Fama-French (2018) 6-factor model in head-to-head factor spanning tests. The q-factor model is an empirical implementation of...

On September 3-4, 2009, SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economics jointly organized the 28th SUERF Colloquium on "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers contained in this SUERF Study jointly published with DNB and Rabobank are based on contributions to this...

A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns....

Using bottom-up information from corporate financial statements, we examine the relation between aggregate investment, future equity returns, and investor sentiment. Consistent with the business cycle literature, corporate investments peak during periods of positive sentiment, yet these periods...

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

When self-interested agents compete for scarce resources, they often exaggerate the promise of their activities. As such, principals must consider both the quality of each opportunity and each agent's credibility. We show that principals are better off with less transparency because they gain...

This paper shows that real decisions depend not only on the total amount of information in prices, but the source of this information -- a manager learns from prices when they contain information not possessed by him. We use the staggered enforcement of insider trading laws across 27 countries...

We exploit unexpected corporate data breaches to study how firms respond to negative reputation events. Data breaches negatively affect firm profitability, value, and reputation for years following the event, but are not triggered by high or low reputations. In response, firms increase their...

Management, directly or indirectly, learns from its firm's stock price, so that a more informative stock price should make the firm more productive. We show that stock price informativeness increases firm productivity. We predict and confirm that the productivity of smaller and younger firms,...