In the four regions (North America, Europe, Japan, and Asia Pacific) we examine, there are value premiums in average stock returns that, except for Japan, decrease with size. Except for Japan, there is return momentum everywhere, and spreads in average momentum returns also decrease from smaller...

Conventional wisdom, reflected in firm, investment bank, and court practice and the way academics teach corporate finance, suggests that the equity cost of capital varies considerably across firms. This practice builds on a vast amount of evidence on expected rate of return differences between...

Factors in prominent asset pricing models are positively autocorrelated. We derive a transformation that turns an autocorrelated factor to a ``time-series efficient'' factor. Time-series efficient factors earn significantly higher Sharpe ratios than the original factors and contain all the...

Average stock returns for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific increase with the book-to-market ratio (B/M) and profitability and are negatively related to investment. For Japan the relation between average returns and B/M is strong, but average returns show little relation to profitability...

By choosing investment strategies that intentionally create exposure to factor betas, investors may be obtaining uncompensated risks. We show across a wide variety of factors and geographical markets that factors constructed from fundamental characteristics have earned high returns, whereas...