What incentives do managers face that might give rise to inefficient investments in leases? If managers make inefficient investments in leases, what economic consequences arise for those managers and their firms? We develop a model of expected investments in leased assets and use the residuals...

We introduce a new approach to predicting market returns using the cross-section of earnings and book values to explain current stock prices and extract aggregate expected returns. The proposed measure is countercyclical; it portends a significant fraction of the time-series variation in stock...