We use the Campbell (1991) return decomposition framework to reexamine the variation in the information content of earnings between profit firms and loss firms and over time. We show that current earnings surprises are more strongly correlated with the discount rate news component of returns for...

Embedding disasters into a general equilibrium production economy with heterogeneous firms induces strong nonlinearity in the pricing kernel, helping explain the empirical failure of the (consumption) CAPM. Our single-factor model reproduces the failure of the CAPM in explaining the value...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

Using hundreds of significant anomalies as testing portfolios, this paper compares the performance of major empirical asset pricing models. The q-factor model and a closely related five-factor model are the two best performing models among a long array of models. The q-factor model outperforms...

We study the effects of political uncertainty on commodity markets from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, commodity prices and inventories decline by 6.6% and 5.7%, respectively, and convenience yields increase by 1.9% in the quarter...

We document a strong positive cross-sectional relation between corporate bond yield spreads and bond return volatilities. As corporate bond prices are generally attributable to both credit risk and illiquidity as discussed in Huang and Huang (2012), we apply a decomposition methodology to...

Motivated by the recent debate on return R2 as an information-efficiency measure, this paper proposes and examines a new hypothesis that R2 is related to investors' biases in processing information. We provide a model to show that R2 decreases with the degree of the marginal investor's...

We document that localized policies aimed at mitigating climate risk can have unintended consequences due to regulatory arbitrage by firms. Using a difference-in-differences framework to study the impact of the California cap-and-trade program with US plant level data, we show that financially...

The investment theory, in which the expected return varies cross-sectionally with investment, expected profitability, and expected growth, is a good start to understanding Graham and Dodd's (1934) Security Analysis. Empirically, the q5 model goes a long way toward explaining prominent equity...

We propose a parsimonious measure based solely on daily stock returns to characterize the severity of microstructure frictions at the individual stock level and assess the impact of frictions on the cross section of stock returns. Stocks with the largest frictions command a value-weighted return...