The literature has provided mixed evidence on the relationship between cash holdings and average stock returns. We empirically verify that the relationship is positive and robust to the adjustment of risk, the construction of cash holdings portfolios, and the weighting scheme of portfolio...

We investigate the pricing of market volatility risk as a risk factor – the innovation risk and as a characteristic risk – the level risk. We find that the pricing of the country-level (local) market volatility risk factor is not robust across 21 developed markets and that the global market...

This paper offers a novel understanding of the cause of the external financing anomaly, a well established observation that net overall external financing activities and future stock returns are negatively related. Recent studies argue that the external financing anomaly is driven by earnings...

We find that firms reduce net debt issuance (NDI, hereafter) when industry peers with the same credit rating were downgraded in the previous year, as opposed to an average NDI increase among all firms. This finding is consistent with the considerations of competition and contagion associated...

We study compound returns to nearly 62,000 global common stocks during the 1990 to 2018 period, documenting that the majority, 56% of US stocks and 61% of non-US stocks, under perform one-month US Treasury bills over the full sample. Focusing on aggregate shareholder wealth creation measured in...

Banks with higher equity risk and faster loan growth have lower abnormal stock returns. By disentangling ex ante cost of capital from cash flow and discount rate news in bank stock returns, we show that the lower returns do not suggest lower cost of capital. The underperformance of banks with...

We examine short sellers' use of textual information in annual reports for shorting activities. We find that more uncertainty and negative words in annual reports are associated with greater abnormal shorting volume. Short selling motivated by textual information negatively predicts stock price...

Hong and Kacperczyk (2010) document that decreases in analyst competition due to broker mergers encourage analysts to please managers, leading to greater consensus optimism bias. We propose three additional effects of analyst competition. The analyst effort hypothesis suggests that weaker...

This paper provides a mis-pricing-based explanation for the negative relation between firm-level productivity and stock returns. Investors appear to under-price unproductive firms and overprice productive firms. We find evidence consistent with the speculative overpricing of productive firms...

We investigate whether and how firm-level political uncertainty affects firms' bank loan contracting. We find that firms facing higher firm-level political uncertainty are charged higher bank loan costs. This impact is amplified for firms with higher degrees of information asymmetry and firms...