We identify all return leader-follower pairs among individual stocks using Granger causality regressions. Thus-identified leaders can reliably predict their followers' returns out of sample, and the return predictability works at the level of individual stocks rather than industries. Our results...

We show that news stories contain information about economic linkages between firms and document that information diffuses slowly across linked stocks. Specifically, we identify linked stocks from co-mentions in news stories and find that linked stocks cross-predict one another's returns in the...

We document that stocks that experience sudden increases in idiosyncratic volatility underperform otherwise similar stocks in the future, and we propose that this phenomenon can be explained by the Miller (1977) conjecture. We show that volatility shocks can be traced to the unusual firm-level...

We show that active equity funds deliberately alter their factor loadings rather than maintaining a constant style. Changes are larger following quarters in which funds either under- or out-perform other funds based on returns or fund flows. Motivated by this observation, we identify a new...

Recent research shows that the implied cost of capital (ICC), measured from analyst forecasts and current stock prices, positively predicts returns at the aggregate level. In contrast, there is a strong negative relation between ICC and future returns in the cross-section. We hypothesize that...

This paper hypothesizes that market liquidity constrains mutual fund managers' ability to outperform, which introduces a higher liquidity risk exposure (beta) for skilled managers. Consistently, we document an annual liquidity beta performance spread of 4% in the cross-section of mutual funds...

This paper studies the effects of predictability on the earnings-returns relation for individual firms and for the aggregate. We demonstrate that prices better anticipate earnings growth at the aggregate level than at the firm level, which implies that random-walk models are inappropriate for...