Using hundreds of significant anomalies as testing portfolios, this paper compares the performance of major empirical asset pricing models. The q-factor model and a closely related five-factor model are the two best performing models among a long array of models. The q-factor model outperforms...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

I construct a neoclassical, Q-theoretical foundation for time-varying expected returns in connection with corporate policies and events. Under certain conditions, stock return equals investment return, which is directly tied with firm characteristics. This single equation is shown analytically...

Previous work shows that the growth rate of industrial production is a common macroeconomic risk factor in the cross-section of expected returns. We demonstrate the connection between momentum profits and shifts in factor loadings on this macroeconomic variable. Winners have temporarily higher...

Is the value premium predictable? We study time-variations of the expected value premium using a two-state Markov switching model. We find that when conditional volatilities are high, the expected excess returns of value stocks are more sensitive to aggregate economic conditions than 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 show that the average difference between the implied volatilities of call and put options on individual equities, which we term the implied volatility spread (IVS), has strong predictive power for stock market returns at horizons between one and six months, with monthly in-sample and...

This paper develops a new method to calculate hedged returns on model-free “equity VIX” option portfolios. Our returns are highly correlated with realized variance minus implied variance. Compared to CBOE’s VIX formula, our formulas are more accurate for both simulated and actual prices,...