More financially constrained firms are riskier and earn higher expected returns than less financially constrained firms, although this effect can be subsumed by size and book-to-market. Further, because the stochastic discount factor makes capital investment more procyclical, financial...

More financially constrained firms are riskier and earn higher expected returns than less financially constrained firms, although this effect can be subsumed by size and book-to-market. Further, because the stochastic discount factor makes capital investment more procyclical, financial...

Recent studies have used the value spread to predict aggregate stock returns to construct cash-flow betas that appear to explain the size and value anomalies. We show that two related variables, the book-to-market spread (the book-to-market of value stocks minus that of growth stocks) and the...