"I document a positive relationship between corporate excess cash holdings and future stock returns. The difference in returns of portfolios of high and low excess cash firms amounts to 5% annually or 6% after standard three-factor risk adjustment. Firms with more excess cash have higher market...

We show that labor search frictions are an important determinant of the cross-section of equity returns. In the data, sorting firms by loadings on labor market tightness, the key statistic of search models, generates a spread in future returns of 6% annually. We propose a partial equilibrium...

Unconditional alphas are biased when conditional beta covaries with the market risk premium (market timing) or volatility (volatility timing). We demonstrate an additional bias (overconditioning) that can occur any time an empiricist estimates risk using information, such as a realized beta,...

Industries are economically linked through customer-supplier trade flows. We show that industry shocks propagating along this inter-sectoral trade network can feed back to the originating industry, causing an "echo" -- intermediate-term autocorrelation in returns. Adopting techniques from graph...