We calculate betas of 3,813 companies using 60 monthly returns each day of December 2001 and January 2002. lt;brgt;lt;brgt;The median of [maximum beta/minimum beta] was 3.07. lt;brgt;lt;brgt;Industry betas are also very unstable. The median (average) of the percentage daily change (in absolute...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

Recent theoretical literature suggests that the magnitude of the systematic risk premium for a multistage investment project is subject to various forces that may cause the premium to change across stages. To test this hypothesis, I investigate whether Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) beta...

Initial Gross Domestic Product (GDP) announcements are important economic signals that convey information on the state of the economy but contain substantial estimation error. We investigate how GDP estimation errors affect firms' real decisions and profitability. Consistent with theoretical...

Although there is significant evidence that customer satisfaction is an important driver of firm profitability, extant literature has largely neglected two intermediate outcomes of customer satisfaction, namely, a firm’s advertising and promotion efficiency and its human capital performance....

This study explores the impact of tourism uncertainty, including economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and travel crises arising from issues such as terrorism and disease outbreaks, on airline stock markets in Korea. Airline stock prices are particularly affected by tourism uncertainty. Using data...

I show that a firm's capital intensity affects the asset pricing implications of investment-specific technology shocks measured by a popular measure, the IMC porfolio. Capital-intensive stocks sorted by the exposure to this measure generate a highly significant average return premium of up to 5%...

We examine the cross-sectional relation between the ratio of log growth in physical capital to log growth in labor and subsequent stock returns. The ratio is a negative predictor of abnormal returns and the relation strengthens with measures of financing constraint while remaining robust to...

We study a production-based present-value relation that implies that fluctuations in the marginal profit-to-marginal Q ratio (mq) are driven by variations in the expected growth of marginal profits (cash-flow channel), expected investment return changes (discount-rate channel), or both. We find...

Equity risk premiums are a central component of every risk and return model in finance and are a key input into estimating costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation. Given their importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in...