We show that political geography has a pervasive effect on the cross-section of stock returns. We collect election results over a 40-year period and use a political alignment index (PAI) of each state's leading politicians with the ruling (presidential) party to proxy for local firms’...

In this paper we examine the relation between equity mispricing and arbitrage risk, and find that stocks with high arbitrage risk have higher estimated mispricing than stocks with low arbitrage risk. These results are not limited to high book-to-market or small capitalization stocks, and they...

In this paper, we examine whether abnormal analyst coverage influences the external financing of the firm. Controlling for self-selection bias in analysts' excessive coverage, we find that firms with high (low) excess analyst coverage consistently engage in higher (lower) external financing than...

In this paper, we examine whether the external financing and investment rate of the firm are influenced by abnormal analyst coverage. We find that firms with high (low) excess analyst coverage have consistently higher (lower) external financing and investment rate than firms of similar size in...

We investigate whether divergence of opinion among investors, manifested in the dispersion of analysts' earnings forecasts, plays an important role in asset pricing. Specifically, we test whether disagreement can explain the cross-sectional return difference between value and growth stocks over...

Several empirical studies show that investment strategies that favor the purchase of stocks with low prices relative to dividends, earnings, book value or other measures of value yield higher returns. Some of these studies imply that investors are too optimistic about (glamour) stocks that have...