This paper explores the impact of product market competition on the positive relation between labor mobility (LM) and future stock returns. We develop a production-based model, which predicts a stronger positive relation between LM and expected returns for firms in highly competitive industries....

The decomposition of consumption beta into a component driven by assets' cash-flow news and one related to assets' discount-rate news reveals that macroeconomic risks embodied in cash flows largely account for the cross-sectional dynamics of average stock returns. Empirically, we find that...

We investigate how individual equity prices react to stock specific expected jump components. We find that a portfolio buying stocks with negative expected jump component and selling stocks with positive expected jump component earns significant returns, equal to 51 basis points per month.The...

We propose a measure of corporate investment plans, namely, the expected investment growth (EIG). We document a robust finding that firms with high EIG have larger future investment growth and earn significantly higher returns than firms with low EIG, which cannot be fully explained by leading...

This paper suggests a novel approach for predicting aggregate stock returns at quarterly and annual frequencies. Weak return predictability is consistent with the view that a stationary component of stock prices is highly persistent. In such cases, expected returns are time-varying but also...

Building on the theoretical asset pricing literature, we examine the role of market risk and the size, book-to-market (BTM), and volatility anomalies in the cross-section of unlevered equity returns. Compared with levered (stock) returns, the unlevered market beta plays a more important role in...

Deep learning is an active area of research in machine learning. I train deep feedforward neural networks (DFN) based on a set of 68 firm characteristics (FC) to predict the US cross-section of stock returns. After applying a network optimization strategy, I find that DFN long-short portfolios...

The Asset pricing literature has produced hundreds of risk factor candidates aimed at explaining the cross-section of expected excess returns, although risk factors which are in fact capable of providing independent information remains an open question. Appling a sparse model, Kozak, Nagel, and...

Despite considerable empirical evidence reporting a negative relationship between net share issuance and subsequent returns, it remains unresolved whether this anomaly is explained by risk or investor irrationality. This paper examines the net share issuance anomaly using seasoned equity...