Using data spanning the 20th century, we show that most accounting-based return anomalies are spurious. When examined out-of-sample by moving either backward or forward in time, anomalies' average returns decrease, and volatilities and correlations with other anomalies increase. The...

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past...

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...

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...

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...