Commonality in Misvaluation, Equity Financing, and the Cross Section of Stock Returns

Behavioral theories suggest that investor misperceptions and market mispricing will be correlated across firms. This paper uses equity financing to identify comovement in returns and commonality in misvaluation. A zero-investment portfolio (UMO, Undervalued Minus Overvalued) built from repurchase and new issue stocks captures excess comovement in general stock returns relative to a set of multi-factor models. Adding UMO to the 3-factors makes the alphas insignificant for portfolios with extreme size and book-to-market, or based on M&A, convertible bond issuance, and dividend initiation, resumption, and omission. The loadings on UMO incrementally predict the cross-section of returns on portfolios as well as individual stocks. Further evidence is consistent with the UMO loading proxying for the common component of a stock's misvaluation.