This paper shows that the puzzling negative cross-sectional relation between dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts and future stock returns may be explained by financial distress, as proxied by credit rating downgrades. Focusing on a sample of firms rated by Standard & Poor's (S&P), we show...

Low credit risk firms realize higher returns than high credit risk firms. This is puzzling because investors seem to pay a premium for bearing credit risk. The credit risk effect manifests itself due to the poor performance of low-rated stocks (which account for 4.2% of total market...

This paper develops and implements an exact finite-sample test of asset pricing models with time-varying risk premia using posterior probabilities. The strength of our approach is that it allows multiple conditional asset pricing specifications, both nested and nonnested, to be tested and...

This article develops an asset allocation framework that incorporates prior beliefs about the extent of stock return predictability explained by asset pricing models. We find that when prior beliefs allow even minor deviations from pricing model implications, the resulting asset allocations...

This article proposes a trading-based explanation for the asymmetric effect in daily volatility of individual stock returns. Previous studies propose two major hypotheses for this phenomenon: leverage effect and time-varying expected returns. However, leverage has no impact on asymmetric...

This article develops a framework that applies to single securities to test whether asset pricing models can explain the size, value, and momentum anomalies. Stock level beta is allowed to vary with firm-level size and book-to-market as well as with macroeconomic variables. With constant beta,...

This paper evaluates hedge fund performance through portfolio strategies that incorporate predictability based on macroeconomic variables. Incorporating predictability substantially improves out-of-sample performance for the entire universe of hedge funds as well as for various investment...