There is a strong presumption in economics that, in a competitive environment, profitability is mean reverting. We provide corroborating evidence. In a simple partial adjustment model, the estimated rate of mean reversion is about 40 percent per year. But a simple partial adjustment model with a...

We use cross-section regressions to study how a firm's value is related to dividends and debt. With a good control for profitability, the regressions can measure how the taxation of dividends and debt affects firm value. Simple tax hypotheses say that value is negatively related to dividends and...

Previous work shows that average returns on common stocks are related to firm characteristics like size, earnings/price, cashflow/price, book-to-market equity, past sales growth, long-term past return, and short term past return. Because these patterns in average returns apparently are not...

We study whether the behavior of stock prices, in relation to size and book to market equity (BE/ME), reflects the behavior of earnings. Consistent with rational pricing, high BE/ME signals persistent poor earnings and low BE/ME signals strong earnings. Moreover, stock prices forecast the...

We estimate that the average value of a dollar invested in the U.S. corporate sector is $1.18. When we delete utilities and current assets, where opportunities for value added seem limited, the estimate jumps to $1.68. We use cross-section regressions to study how value is related to dividends...

We use bootstrap simulations to examine the properties of long-horizon U.S. stock market returns. Distributions of continuously compounded returns converge toward normal distributions as we extend the horizon from one to 30 years, and distributions of dollar payoffs converge toward lognormal. We...

We use the cross-section regression approach of Fama and MacBeth (FM 1973) to construct cross-section factors corresponding to the time-series factors of Fama and French (FF 2015). Time-series models that use only cross-section factors provide better descriptions of average returns than...

The aggregate portfolio of U.S. equity mutual funds is close to the market portfolio, but the high costs of active management show up intact as lower returns to investors. Bootstrap simulations suggest that few funds produce benchmark adjusted expected returns sufficient to cover their costs. If...

We examine three issues about choice of factors in the five-factor model of Fama and French (FF 2015): (i) cash profitability (CP) versus operating profitability (OP) as the variable used to construct profitability factors, (ii) long – short spread factors versus excess returns on the long or...

The average monthly premium of the Market return over the one-month T-Bill return is substantial, as are average premiums of value and small stocks over Market. As the return horizon increases, premium distributions become more disperse, but they move to the right (toward higher values) faster...