We use the Campbell (1991) return decomposition framework to reexamine the variation in the information content of earnings between profit firms and loss firms and over time. We show that current earnings surprises are more strongly correlated with the discount rate news component of returns for...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

When Capital Asset pricing Model (CAPM) is considered as valid asset pricing theory, Security Market Line (SML) is supposed to give ex-ante returns for the single period investment horizon. Since the required returns should be same as the cost of equity (discount rates) in efficient markets, SML...

We show analytically under quite general conditions that implied rates of return based on analysts' earnings forecasts are only a downward biased estimator for future expected one-period returns and therefore not suited for computing market risk premia. The extent of this bias is substantial as...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

We examine the effect of aggregate cash flow news and discount rate news on momentum returns. We find that momentum profits are higher following aggregate positive cash flow news, even in down markets or low sentiment periods. This finding expands on the evidence in Cooper et al. (2004) that...

We perform an extensive and robust study of the performance of three different pairs trading strategies - the distance, cointegration, and copula methods - on the entire US equity market from 1962 to 2014 with time-varying trading costs. For the cointegration and copula methods, we design a...

Low-risk stocks exhibit higher returns than predicted by established asset pricing models, but this anomaly seems to be explained by the new Fama-French five-factor model, which includes a profitability factor. We argue that this conclusion is premature given the lack of empirical evidence for a...

Operating leverage (OL) and profitability are interrelated determinants of stock returns. We show that the outperformance of firms with high OL is driven by periods of unconstrained aggregate funding conditions. Firms with high OL are more risky in general, but when the Fed eases funding...

We find profitability measures fail to explain future stock returns of China's A-shares. In addition, although profitability growth significantly and positively correlates with the cumulative stock return in the following year, profitability measures do not predict profitability growth,...