Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their capital investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-rate hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increases with the...

The anomalies literature in capital markets research is based (almost) exclusively on average realized returns. In contrast, we construct accounting-based expected returns for dollar neutral long-short trading strategies formed on a wide array of anomaly variables, including book-to-market,...

We use a production-based asset pricing model to investigate whether financing constraints are quantitatively important for the cross-section of returns. Specifically, we use GMM to explore the stochastic Euler equation imposed on returns by optimal investment. Our methods can identify the...

This paper asks whether the asset pricing fluctuations induced by the presence of costly external finance are empirically plausible. To accomplish this, we incorporate costly external finance into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model and explore its implications for the properties of...

We incorporate costly external finance in an investment-based asset pricing model and investigate whether financing frictions are quantitatively important for pricing a cross-section of expected returns. We show that common assumptions about the nature of the financing frictions are captured by...

Using the Markov switching framework of Perez-Quiros and Timmermann (2000), we show that the expected value-minus-growth returns display strong countercyclical variations. Under a variety of flexibility proxies such as the ratio of fixed assets to total assets, the frequency of disinvestment,...

We propose a new multifactor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity motivated from neoclassical reasoning. The neoclassical three-factor model goes a long way in explaining the average returns across testing portfolios formed...

The neoclassical q-theory is a good start to understand the cross section of returns. Under constant return to scale, stock returns equal levered investment returns that are tied directly with characteristics. This equation generates the relations of average returns with book-to-market,...

Fama and French (2002) estimate the equity premium using dividend growth rates to measure expected rates of capital gain. We use a similar method to study the value premium. From 1941 to 2005, the expected HML return is on average 6.0% per annum, consisting of an expected dividend-growth...

This paper revisits the time-series relation between the conditional risk premium and variance of the equity market portfolio. The main innovation is that we construct a measure of the ex ante equity market risk premium using corporate bond yield spread data. This measure is forward-looking and...