More financially constrained firms are riskier and earn higher expected returns than less financially constrained firms, although this effect can be subsumed by size and book-to-market. Further, because the stochastic discount factor makes capital investment more procyclical, financial...

We use a fully-specified neoclassical model augmented with costly external equity as a laboratory to study the relations between stock returns and equity financing decisions. Simulations show that the model can simultaneously and in many cases quantitatively reproduce: procyclical equity issuance;...

We document a new stylized fact regarding the term-structure of futures volatility. We show that the relation between the volatility of futures prices and the slope of the term structure of prices is non-monotone and has a %u201CV-shape%u201D'. This aspect of the data cannot be generated by...

Value stocks are more exposed to disaster risk than growth stocks. Embedding disasters into an investment-based asset pricing model induces strong nonlinearity in the pricing kernel. Our single-factor model reproduces the failure of the CAPM in explaining the value premium in finite samples in...

Motivated from investment-based asset pricing, we propose a new factor model consisting of the market factor, a size factor, an investment factor, and a return on equity factor. The new factor model outperforms the Carhart four-factor model in pricing portfolios formed on earnings surprise,...

This paper compares the Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2014) q-factor model and the Fama and French (2014a) five-factor model on both conceptual and empirical grounds. It raises four concerns with the motivation of the five-factor model: The internal rate of return often correlates negatively with the...

We study the interactions between the stock market and the labor market. When aggregate risk premiums are time-varying, predictive variables for market excess returns should forecast long-horizon growth in the marginal benefit of hiring and thereby long-horizon aggregate employment growth....

We use yield spreads to construct ex-ante returns on corporate securities, and then use the ex-ante returns in asset pricing assets. Differently from the standard approach, our tests do not use ex-post average returns as a proxy for expected returns. We find that the market beta plays a much...

In a frictionless world, investment is perfectly elastic to changes in the discount rate. With financial frictions, investment is less elastic, meaning that a given magnitude of change in investment is associated with a higher magnitude of change in the discount rate. Equivalently, investment is...

Adding a return factor based on capital investment into standard, calendar-time factor regressions makes underperformance following seasoned equity offerings largely insignificant and reduces its magnitude by 37-46%. The reason is that issuers invest more than nonissuers matched on size and...