Recent studies find evidence in favour of return predictability, and argue that their positive findings result from their ability to capture expected returns. We assess the forecasting performance of two popular approaches to estimating expected equity returns, a dividend discount model (DDM)...

We provide strong support for the underappreciated expected earnings hypothesis of negative correlation between aggregate stock returns and earnings (Sadka and Sadka (2009); Choi, Kalay, and Sadka (2016)). For the 1970 to 2000 period studied by Kothari, Lewellen, and Warner (2006), our powerful...

This article documents how the changing composition of U.S. publicly traded firms has prompted a decline in the long-run mean of the aggregate dividend-price ratio, most notably since the 1970s. Adjusting the dividend-price ratio for such changes resolves several issues with respect to the...

Quarterly earnings conference calls are becoming a more pervasive tool for corporate disclosure. However, the extent to which the market embeds information contained in the tone (i.e. sentiment) of conference call wording is unknown. Using computer aided content analysis, we examine the...

Appendix is available at: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3395415" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3395415Identifying firm connections by shared analyst coverage, we find that a connected-firm (CF) momentum factor generates a monthly alpha of 1.68% (t = 9.67). In spanning regressions, the alphas of...

Recent research finds that investors, broadly defined, react to the linguistic tone of quarterly earnings conference calls; there is a positive relation between firms' stock returns and call tone (a measure of “sentiment” related word tabulations). However, this type of soft information can...

We create a market-wide measure of dispersion in options investors' expectations by aggregating across all stocks the dispersion in trading volume across moneynesses (DISP). DISP exhibits strong negative predictive power for future market returns and its information content is not subsumed by...

Economic and reporting development factors affect the timing and non-timing roles of accruals, which in turn affect the correlation between accruals and operating cash flows (CFO). We show that the strength of the accrual anomaly varies predictably with the economic determinants of the...

This study presents evidence suggesting that investors do not fully unravel predictable pessimism in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. We show that measures of prior consensus and individual analyst forecast pessimism are predictive of both the sign of firms' earnings surprises and the...

We investigate the relation between two market anomalies to provide insights into analysts' role as information intermediaries. Prior research finds that accruals and analyst earnings forecast revisions predict future returns. We find that the accrual and forecast revision strategies generate...