This paper studies the cross-sectional risk-return trade-off in the stock market. A fundamental principle in finance is the positive relation between risk and expected return, whereas recent empirical evidence suggests the opposite. Using several intuitive risk measures, we show that the...

Recent models of the value premium typically endogenously link B/M to firm-specific attributes. The value firms earn higher subsequent returns because these firms command a higher risk premium due to a higher default probability, lower profitability, higher operating leverage, shorter cash flow...

We propose a novel measure of investment plans, namely, expected investment growth (EIG) and find stocks with high EIG outperform stocks with low EIG by 17% per annum. This premium can be generated in a neoclassical model with the investment plan friction, in which a firm's expected returns...

Recent studies have proposed a large set of powerful characteristics-based factors in the stock market. This study examines the pricing of these factors using portfolios that are formed by directly sorting stocks based on their exposure to these factors. These beta-sorted portfolios have very...

In this paper we investigate whether stock market overpricing leads to aggregate (real) inefficiencies. We first investigate a standard dynamic contracting model of investment subject to financing constraints. We show that stock market mispricing will have two robust effects on welfare: on the...