Prior research finds expected returns decrease in firm-level total asset growth. This study shows that external growth, measured as asset growth raised from capital markets, has stronger power than total asset growth predicting the cross section of average returns. External growth subsumes the...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

Global economic growth at the end of the year strongly predicts returns from a wide spectrum of international assets, such as global, regional, and individual-country stocks, FX, and commodities. Global economic growth at other times of the year does not predict international returns. Low growth...

We re-visit a puzzling result that in U.S. post-WW II data the dividend price ratio can predict aggregate returns but not dividend growth. We find that predictive regressions are sensitive to the method used to aggregate firm-level data. Using value weighted firm-level data we find strong...

I examine the ability of equity market illiquidity to predict Australian macroeconomic variables, between 1976 and 2010. In contrast to existing, U.S.-based, studies, I find that stock market illiquidity does not, on average, have much predictive power over economic growth. Consistent with the...

Møller and Rangvid (2015) report that economic growth at the end of the year is a strong predictor of future stock returns for the post-WWII period, whereas economic growth during the rest of the year does not. Revisiting these results with an extended period 1926-2020, we find that this...