Agents who place greater weight on the risk of downside losses than they are attach to upside gains demand greater compensation for holding stocks with high downside risk. We show that the cross-section of stock returns reflects a premium for downside risk. Stocks that covary strongly with the...

Over the long-run from 1926 to 2001, the CAPM can account for the spread in the returns of portfolios sorted by book-to-market ratios. In contrast, using data covering the period after 1963, many studies find strong evidence of a book-to-market effect using conventional asymptotic standard...

We develop a model of stock prices in which there are both differences of opinion among investors as well as short-sales constraints. The key insight that emerges is that breadth of ownership is a valuation indicator. When breadth is low - i.e., when few investors have long positions in the...

This paper is an investigation into the determinants of asymmetries in stock returns. We develop a series of cross-sectional regression specifications which attempt to forecast skewness in the daily returns of individual stocks. Negative skewness is most pronounced in stocks that have...

We develop a model of stock prices in which there are both differences of opinion among investors as well as short-sales constraints. The key insight that emerges is that breadth of ownership is a valuation indicator. When breadth is low i.e., when few investors have long positions in the stock...