The equity premium of interest in theoretical models is the extra return investors anticipate when purchasing risky stock instead of risk-free debt. Unfortunately, we do not observe this ex ante premium in the data; we only observe the returns that investors actually receive ex post, after they...

Market expectations of future return volatility play a crucial role in finance; so too does our understanding of the process by which information is incorporated in security prices through the trading process. The authors seek to learn something about both of these issues by investigating...

Previous research has documented robust links between seasonal variation in length of day, seasonal depression (known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD), risk aversion, and stock market returns. The influence of SAD on market returns, known as the SAD effect, is large. The authors study the...

The author establishes that classic firm-valuation methods based on dividends (or equivalently free cash flows or residual income) can be modified to be based on any financial variable (V), such as sales, given V is cointegrated with the fundamental value (P) of the firm. The variable V (or a...

This study proposes that the Government of Canada issue a new debt security, the “Trill,” which would essentially offer Canadian investors an equity stake in the Canadian economy. The Trill is so-named because its coupon payment would be one-trillionth of Canada’s GDP. Similar to shares...

Companies sometimes use statistical analysis to anticipate their bond ratings or a change in the rating. However, different statistical models can yield different ratings forecasts, and there is no clear rule for which model is preferable. We use several forecasting methods to predict bond...

A core tenet of financial economics states that, in a market populated by rational investors, the fundamental price of an asset equals the expected discounted present value of its cash flows. This implies, for example, that in a rational and efficient bubble-free market, stock-price movements...