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...

We examine whether the recent regime of increased liquidity and trading activity is associated with attenuation of prominent equity return anomalies due to increased arbitrage. We find that the majority of the anomalies have attenuated and the average returns from a portfolio strategy based on...