When the discount rate falls, investment should rise. Thus with time-varying discount rates and instantly changing investment, investment should positively covary with current stock returns and negatively covary with future stock returns. Aggregate nonresidential U.S. investment contradicts both these implications, probably because of investment lags. Investment plans, however, satisfy both imp...

This paper investigates the relationship between aggregate stock market trading volume and the serial correlation of daily stock returns. For both stock indexes and individual large stocks, the first-order daily return autocorrelation tends to decline with volume. The paper explains this phenomenon using a model in which risk-averse "market makers" accommodate buying or selling pressure from "l...

We investigate stock option exercise decisions by over 50,000 employees at seven corporations. Controlling for economic factors, psychological factors inuence exercise. Consistent with psychological models of beliefs, employees exercise in response to stock price trends—exercise is positively related to stock returns during the preceding month and negatively related to returns over longer hori...

modern portfolio theory is based on harry markowitz's 1952 work on mean-variance portfolios. he stated that a rational investor should either maximize his expected return for a given level of risk, or minimize his risk for a given expected return. in this study the markowitz model with cardinality constraints was studied. we extend the standard model to include cardinality constraints that...

A large empirical literature has reported that the futures market contains valuable information for explaining stock returns and that stock returns display signi ̄cant cross-correlations internationally. A parallel literature has recorded evidence that the distribution of stock returns is close to a mixture of normal distributions and that Markov switching models may therefore provide an adequat...

Aggregate stock market returns display negative skewness. Firm-level stock returns display positive skewness. The large literature that tries to explain the first stylized fact ignores the second. This paper provides a unified theory that reconciles the two facts. I build a stationary asset pricing model of firm announcement events where firm returns display positive skewness. I then show that ...

One of the most prominent stylized facts in corporate finance is that firms are more likely to issue equity following periods of high stock returns. We document that firms exhibit such timing behavior only in response to high returns that coincide with strong institutional investor demand for their stock. When not accompanied by institutional purchases, stock price increases have little impact ...

During the last two decades the academiccommunity has frequently reconsidered the issue of stock market efficiency and predictability of stock returns. The empirical evidence suggests that prices do not reflect all publicly available information, hence indicating that future stock returns are at least to some extent predictable. Consequently, there seem to be anomalies present on the stock mark...

We show that proxies for firms’ incentives to manage earnings expectations toward beatable levels contain strong predictive power for earnings announcement returns. Firms with stronger incentives to manage expectations predictably underperform before, and subsequently outperform during, their expected earnings announcement months. This predictable V-shaped pattern in prices yields strategy retu...

This letter is intended to demonstrate that price inflation and stock returns display differing relationships depending on the measure of inflation used. Using data from 1966 – 2009, it appears that no correlation exists between any measure of price inflation and stock returns or dividend yield in the period 1983 – 2009. We do find a negative correlation between monetary inflation and dividend ...