We examine the cross-section of international equity risk premia with machine learning methods. We identify, classify, and calculate 88 market characteristics and use them to forecast country returns with various machine learning techniques. While all algorithms produce substantial economic...

We study the transmission of sovereign debt inflow shocks on domestic firms. We exploit episodes of large sovereign debt inflows in six emerging countries that are due to the announcements of these countries' inclusion in two major local-currency sovereign debt indexes. We show that these...

We analyze the sentiment of emojis separately to the plain text-expressed sentiment in Reddit posts about meme stocks such as Gamestop during the Covid-19 pandemic. We document that a one-standard deviation change in emoji sentiment magnitude measured as the quantity of positive emoji sentiment...

We investigate the use of the normalized imbalance between option volumes corresponding to positive and negative market views, as a predictor for directional price movements in the spot market. Via a nonlinear analysis, and using a decomposition of aggregated volumes into five distinct market...

We identify model-free mispricing factors and relate them to global stock prices and investor beliefs. The factors measure variation in the relative mispricing of closed-end funds and their underlying assets. We design three factors to reflect the beliefs and capital flows of important...

This paper explores the predictive power of the absolute delta beta (ADB) on future cross-sectional stock returns. By univariate portfolio analysis, bivariate portfolio analysis, and decomposition of predictive power, we find that the ADB can produce an excess return in the next month. The...

This paper proposes long-run estimates of ex ante real interest rates in Switzerland and other developed economies, and it describes their relative evolution. Our results highlight the decline in-and convergence of-global real interest rates that has unfolded over the last three decades for all...

The study examines the vital connection between stock returns and oil price changes for oil exporting/importing countries separately. We present evidence employing granger causality, impulse response and error variance decomposition based on panel vector autoregression. The results of panel...

This study examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and expected stock returns. Using daily stock return data in the US market from the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), we estimate monthly idiosyncratic volatility and...

This paper explores the effect of oil price fluctuations on the stock returns of U.S. oil firms using a strategy of identification through heteroskedasticity exploiting the 2020 oil crash. Results are twofold. First, we find that a decline in oil prices statistically significantly reduces stock...

We examine subjective risk premia implied by return expectations of individual investors and professionals for aggregate portfolios of stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodity futures. While in-sample predictive regressions with realized excess returns suggest that objective risk premia vary...

The rapid growth of electric vehicles, solar roofs, and wind power suggests that the potential growth in green equity investments is an emerging trend. Accordingly, this study measured the predictors of excess equity returns in a portfolio of global green energy producers, from 2010 to 2019....

We investigate the effect of COVID-19 on the investors’ awareness about climate risk. The COVID-19 have led investors to draw a parallel between pandemic and climate risks, renewing investors’ attention to climate change. Using a novel dataset of trading by each investor types for Korean...

Previous studies find corporate investments negatively predict firm performance and stock returns. Using data from the Chinese A-share stock market, we find firms that substantially increase their investments have higher, rather than lower, subsequent stock returns. This effect persists after...

We infer the forward-looking Bitcoin risk premium from options contracts. Using data from 2018 to 2020, we show that the expected excess returns for Bitcoin are time-varying and significantly higher than in equities or gold, averaging almost 80% per annum. A temporal analysis of the term...

We investigate the impact of financial news on equity returns and introduce a non-parametric model to generate a sentiment signal, which is then used as a predictor for short-term, single-stock equity return forecasts.We build on Google's BERT model (for Bidirectional Encoder Representations for...

We study the problem of detecting structural instability of factor strength in asset pricing models for financial returns. We allow for strong and weaker factors, in which the sum of squared betas grows at a rate equal to and slower than the number of test assets, respectively: this growth rate...

Stock returns predictability has been a long-standing topic in the literature on financial economics. Developments in prediction technology have facilitated the wide use of machine learning techniques, which motivates our study of whether stock returns predictability can be improved using...

The equity risk premium is generally considered to be a reward that investors earn on top of the prevailing risk-free return, implying that, all else equal, total expected stock returns should increase with the level of the risk-free return. We examine whether this notion is true using long-term...

Momentum is a pervasive characteristic of financial markets that lacks a broadly accepted explanation. In addition to its longstanding challenge to asset pricing theory, recent work finds that momentum poses a challenge for expected utility (EU) theory, opening an avenue for new decision...

We propose a belief-generating model from which we build a statistical measure of investor disagreement. We simulate differences in beliefs across investors by endowing them with different machine learning models for forecasting returns from the same set of inputs. We measure disagreement as the...

Energy policy uncertainty - as measured by uncertainty about a U.S. President signing an energy related executive order in the future - covaries positively with corporate investment and aggregate consumption growth, and its innovations carry a negative price of risk. I propose and test a...

This paper provides insights about the information content and predictive ability of the intrinsic value of the firm in an asset pricing context. The intrinsic value of a firm is of great importance for both the management and the investors of the company. We seek to assess whether the...

We examine the effects of limited investor attention on stock returns by using Google search volume index to measure investor attention. We also investigate whether national culture and market development have any role in this relationship. We find that the impact of investor attention on stock...

The paper investigates whether oil price shocks and oil price volatility provide predictive information for the state of the US stock market returns and volatility. The disaggregation of oil price shocks according to their origin allows us to assess whether they contain incremental forecasting...

This paper examines the effect of return dispersion on the dynamics of stock market liquidity, risk and return. Moreover, the importance of return dispersion in forecasting aggregate economic activity is rediscovered in the context of a regime switching model that accounts for stock market...

We show that characteristics known to predict returns to U.S. stocks also predict returns for a broad sample of nearly 52,000 stocks from fifty-eight non-U.S. countries, and we evaluate the extent to which six prominent corporate events, including initial and secondary stock offerings, stock...

In the US, Cohen and Frazzini (2008) shows that suppliers returns are predictable using lagged customers returns. The converse does not hold. In China, however, both predictive directions hold: customer returns predict future sup-pliers’ returns as in the US, and suppliers returns predict...

Companies face significant carbon-transition risk as the global economy works to combat climate change. This paper studies the market-based premium associated with the carbon-transition risk globally and finds that firms with more carbon-intense business models earn higher returns in recent...

Do stocks protect against rising inflation expectations? We directly measure investors' expectations using inflation-indexed contracts and show that stocks offer positive returns in response to higher expectations; i.e., that stocks hedge against changes in expectations. Using high-frequency...

Economic theory predicts that (in the absence of mispricing) the excess return to socially responsible businesses is negative in equilibrium. In contrast, using the state-of-art empirical models and a sample spanning four decades (1984-2020), an equal-weighted portfolio of companies that treat...

This paper studies the causal effects of personal investment taxes on stock demand, stock returns, and the financial decisions of companies. I exploit a change in legislation in 2013 which allowed stocks listed on the Alternative Investment Market, a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange, to...

An equal-weighted portfolio of Best Brands (BBs) in the U.S. earns an excess return of 25 to 35 bps per month during the period 2000-2020. This result is remarkably robust across various factor models and therefore is not driven by exposure to common (risk) factors. The excess returns of the BB...