We document the existence of an anomalous asset growth effect globally and find that it comprises some combination of a market mispricing and some pervasive global systematic risk. To support our findings, we explore a battery of tests to include how country-level governance and market...

Using idiosyncratic volatility as a proxy for arbitrage costs, the authors found that the highly publicized accrual and asset growth anomalies exist because of high barriers to arbitrage, occurring predominantly in the universe of stocks with higher arbitrage risks. Therefore, investors who seek...

We study the return predictive power of asset growth related measures in the MSCI World Universe, which includes all the developed markets. We find strong return predictive power of asset growth related measures in these markets. This power is particularly stronger for two-year total asset...