Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

Building on neoclassical reasoning, we propose a new multi-factor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity. The neo- classical three-factor model outperforms traditional factor models in explaining the average returns across...

Value stocks are more exposed to disaster risk than growth stocks. Embedding disasters into an investment-based asset pricing model induces strong nonlinearity in the pricing kernel. Our single-factor model reproduces the failure of the CAPM in explaining the value premium in finite samples in...

Is the value premium predictable? We study time-variations of the expected value premium using a two-state Markov switching model. We find that when conditional volatilities are high, the expected excess returns of value stocks are more sensitive to aggregate economic conditions than the...

We construct accounting-based costs of equity for dollar neutral long-short trading strategies formed on a comprehensive list of anomaly variables. These variables include book-to-market, size, composite issuance, net stock issues, abnormal investment, asset growth, investment-to-assets,...

We question a deep-ingrained doctrine in asset pricing: If an empirical characteristic-return relation is consistent with investor "rationality," the relation must be "explained" by a risk factor model. The investment approach changes the big picture of asset pricing. Factors formed on...

Motivated from investment-based asset pricing, we propose a new factor model that consists of the market factor, a size factor, an investment factor, and a return-on-equity factor. The new model [i] outperforms the Carhart (1997) four-factor model in pricing portfolios formed on earnings...

This paper compares the Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2014) q-factor model and the Fama and French (2014a) five-factor model on both conceptual and empirical grounds. It raises four concerns with the motivation of the five-factor model: The internal rate of return often correlates negatively with the...

Optimal investment of firms implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity (two major components of the marginal benefit of...

Motivated from investment-based asset pricing, we propose a new factor model consisting of the market factor, a size factor, an investment factor, and a return on equity factor. The new factor model outperforms the Carhart four-factor model in pricing portfolios formed on earnings surprise,...