Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

The anomalies literature in capital markets research in finance and accounting is based (almost) exclusively on average realized returns. In contrast, we construct accounting-based expected returns for dollar neutral long-short trading strategies formed on a wide array of anomaly variables,...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize based on q-theory that firms optimally adjust their accruals in response to discount rate changes. A higher discount rate means less profitable investments and lower accruals, and a lower discount rate means more profitable...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their capital investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-rate hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increases with the...

The anomalies literature in capital markets research is based (almost) exclusively on average realized returns. In contrast, we construct accounting-based expected returns for dollar neutral long-short trading strategies formed on a wide array of anomaly variables, including book-to-market,...