Fama and French (2002) estimate the equity premium using dividend growth rates to measure expected rates of capital gain. We use a similar method to study the value premium. From 1941 to 2005, the expected HML return is on average 6.0% per annum, consisting of an expected dividend-growth...

This paper revisits the time-series relation between the conditional risk premium and variance of the equity market portfolio. The main innovation is that we construct a measure of the ex ante equity market risk premium using corporate bond yield spread data. This measure is forward-looking and...

We use corporate bond yield spreads to gauge investors' return expectations. We then replace standard ex-post, averaged measures of return with our ex-ante return measures in asset pricing assets. We find that the market beta plays a significant role in the cross-section of returns when...

A disconcerting, albeit generally accepted, finding is that aggregate stock return is predictable by dividend yield but dividend growth is unpredictable. I show that part of this lack of dividend growth predictability stems from how dividend growth is constructed. I then document a dramatic...

A crucial issue in asset pricing is to understand the relative importance of discount rate (DR) news and cash flow (CF) news in driving the time-series and cross-sectional variations of stock returns. Many studies directly estimate the DR news but back out the CF news as the residual. We argue...

The negative relation between the market-to-book ratio and leverage ratio is one of the most widely documented empirical regularities in the capital structure literature. Most related studies take this negative relation as given and debate about its economic interpretation. We show that firms...

We seek economic interpretations for two well-known empirical regularities. First, it is well known that more profitable firms tend to have lower leverage ratios, a pattern driven by the preference on internal funds by these profitable firms. Some recent theoretical development has used...

We examine whether liquidity is priced in corporate yield spreads. Using a battery of liquidity measures covering over 4000 corporate bonds and spanning investment grade and speculative grade categories, we find that more illiquid bonds earn higher yield spreads; and that an improvement of...

Building on neoclassical reasoning, we propose a new multi-factor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity. The neo- classical three-factor model outperforms traditional factor models in explaining the average returns across...

Fama and French (2002) estimate the equity premium using dividend growth rates to measure the expected rate of capital gain. We use similar methods to study the value premium. From 1941 to 2002, the expected HML return is on average 5.1% per annum, consisting of an expected-dividend-growth...