This paper examines the impact of geographic technological diversification on firm innovativeness. Our empirical study conducted on a panel of U.S. manufacturing companies shows that firms with geographic technological diversification are more innovative (as measured by both patents and citations) than firms without. Furthermore, we find that the positive relation between geographic technological diversification and firm innovation is driven by domestic technological diversification, while international technological diversification is negatively related to firm innovation. Our valuation tests further confirm the detrimental effect of international technological diversification on shareholder wealth.

Previous studies have identified a negative relation between firms’hiring rates and future stock returns in the cross-section. We document that this relation is significantly steeper in industries that rely relatively more on high-skill workers than low-skill workers. A longshort portfolio sorted on firm-level hiring rate earns an average annual return of 8.6 % in high-skill industries, and only 0.9 % in low-skill industries. Moreover, this pattern is not explained by the standard CAPM. These findings are consistent with a neoclassical model with labor force heterogeneity and labor market frictions if it is more costly to replace high-skill than low-skill workers.

Motivated by psychological evidence on limited investor attention and anchoring, we propose two proxies for the degree to which traders under- and overreact to news, namely, the nearness to the Dow 52-week high and the nearness to the Dow historical high, respectively. We find that nearness to the 52-week high positively predicts future aggregate market returns, while nearness to the historical high negatively predicts future market returns. We further show that our proxies contain information about future market returns that is not captured by traditional macroeconomic variables and that our results are robust across G7 countries. Comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations and comparisons with the NYSE/Amex market cap index confirm the significance of these findings.

We examine the implications of short-run and long-run consumption risks on the momentum and long-term contrarian profits and the value premium in a unified economic framework. By introducing time-varying firm cash flow exposures to the short-run and long-run shocks in consumption growth, we find the otherwise standard intertemporal asset pricing model goes a long way toward generating the momentum and long-term contrarian profits and the value premium. The model also reproduces the size effect, the pairwise correlations between the profitabilities of these investment strategies, and the performance of the standard CAPM and the consumption CAPM in explaining these well-documented return behaviors. Received January 25, 2016; editorial decision July 21, 2016 by Editor Leonid Kogan.

Using a novel measure of industry exposure to government spending, we show predictable variation in cash flows and stock returns over political cycles. During Democratic presidencies, firms with high government exposure experience higher cash flows and stock returns, while the opposite pattern holds true during Republican presidencies. Business cycles, firm characteristics, and standard risk factors do not account for the pattern in returns across presidencies. An investment strategy that exploits the presidential cycle predictability generates abnormal returns as large as 6.9% per annum. Our results suggest market underreaction to predictable variation in the effect of government spending policies.

ABSTRACT We show theoretically that variable production costs reduce systematic risk of firms' cash flows if capital and variable inputs are complementary in firms' production and input prices are procyclical. In our dynamic model, this operating hedge effect is weaker for more profitable firms, giving rise to a gross profitability premium. Moreover, gross profitability and value factors are distinct and negatively correlated, and their premia are not captured by the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). We estimate the model by simulated method of moments, and find that its main implications for stock returns and cash flow dynamics are quantitatively consistent with the data.

Previous studies have identified a negative relation between firms’ hiring rates and future stock returns in the cross-section. We document that this relation is significantly steeper in industries that rely relatively more on high-skill workers than low-skill workers. A long-short portfolio sorted on firm-level hiring rate earns an average annual return of 8.6% in high-skill industries, and only 0.9% in low-skill industries. Moreover, this pattern is not explained by the standard CAPM. These findings are consistent with a neoclassical model with labor force heterogeneity and labor market frictions if it is more costly to replace high-skill than low-skill workers. Received August 14, 2015; editorial decision December 31, 2016 by Editor Leonid Kogan.

Abstract A common prediction of macroeconomic models of credit market frictions is that the tightness of financial constraints is countercyclical. Theory suggests a negative collateralizability premium; that is, capital that can be used as collateral to relax financial constraints insures against aggregate shocks and commands a lower risk compensation compared with noncollateralizable assets. We show that a long-short portfolio constructed using a novel measure of asset collateralizability generates an average excess return of around 8% per year. We develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and financial constraints to quantitatively account for the collateralizability premium.

ABSTRACT We propose a measure of the valuation gap between debt and equity—debt‐equity spread (DES)—based on the difference between actual and equity‐implied credit spreads. DES predicts cross‐sectional stock and bond returns in opposite directions. This predictability is unique compared to existing mispricing measures and cannot be explained by exposures to various risk factors. High‐DES firms are more likely to issue equity and retire debt, and have more insider equity selling. These findings are consistent with DES capturing relative mispricing between debt and equity, and provide empirical support for the model of partially segmented markets in Greenwood, Hanson, and Liao (2018, Review of Financial Studies 31, 3307–3343).