Whereas Poterba and Summers (1995) find that firms use hurdle rates that are unrelated to their CAPM betas, Graham and Harvey (2001) find that 74% of their survey firms use the CAPM for capital budgeting. We provide an explanation for these two apparently contradictory conclusions. We find that...

A key input to the capital budgeting process is the cost of capital. Financial managers most often use the CAPM for estimating the cost of capital for which they need to know the market risk premium. Textbooks advocate using the historical value for the U.S. equity premium as the market risk...

Between 2016 and 2023, the top 10% of carbon-emission-intensive firms (heavy emitters) accounted for over 90% of all Scope 1 emissions from U.S. public companies. We observe that about 35% of the market capitalization of 'Value' portfolios, compared to 5% of 'Growth' portfolios, regardless of...

I show that frequent batch auctions for stocks have the potential to reduce the severity of stock price crashes when they occur. For a given sequence of orders from a continuous electronic limit order book market, matching orders using one second apart batch auctions results in nearly the same...

We demonstrate, using data for the period 1954-2003, that differences in exposure to consumption risk explains cross sectional differences in average excess returns (cost of equity capital) across the 25 benchmark equity portfolios constructed by Fama and French (1993). We use yearly returns on...

We develop a jackknife estimator for the conditional variance of a minimum-tracking- error-variance portfolio constructed using estimated covariances. We empirically evaluate the performance of our estimator using an optimal portfolio of 200 stocks that has the lowest tracking error with respect...

We show that superior performance relative to peers during stressful times identifies higher quality firms as measured by conventional historical financial statement based measures as well as default probability measures. Quality measured this way is persistent, but different from price...

We present a latent variable model of dividends that predicts, out-of-sample, 39.5% to 41.3% of the variation in annual dividend growth rates between 1975 and 2016. Further, when learning about dividend dynamics is incorporated into a long-run risks model, the model predicts, out-of-sample,...

We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies -- momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns -- a...

According to the dynamic version of the Gordon growth model, the long-run expected return on stocks, stock yield, is the sum of the dividend yield on stocks plus some weighted average of expected future growth rates in dividends. We construct a measure of stock yield based on sell-side analysts'...