We examine stock-market volatility around the quarterly expirations of stock index futures contracts and nonquarterly expirations of stock index options, using estimates of the volatility implicit in the option prices. The option prices reflect increases in the volatility of the underlying stock indexes around both quarterly and nonquarterly expiration dates. Analysis of the residual returns on index options provides evidence consistent with an unexpected increase in market volatility around expiration dates.

In this paper, we examine whether managers time their debt-equity choices to exploit market mispricing. Controlling for the level of external financing and corporate investment activities, we find evidence consistent with the market timing hypothesis. We find managers issue more equity relative to debt when analysts are relatively optimistic about firms’ long-term growth prospects. Moreover, equity issuers earn lower returns than debt issuers at subsequent earnings announcements. Controlling for research and development (R&D) investment, we find that, consistent with the market timing hypothesis and inconsistent with the extant empirical literature, the debt-equity composition of external financing predicts year-ahead stock return.

This paper develops and tests procedures for ranking the performance of security analysts based on the timeliness of their earnings forecasts, the abnormal trading volume associated with these forecasts, and forecast accuracy. Our framework provides an objective assessment of analyst quality that differs from the standard approach, which uses survey evidence to rate analysts. We find that lead analysts identified by our measure of forecast timeliness have a greater impact on stock prices than follower analysts. Further, we find that performance rankings based on forecast timeliness are more informative than rankings based on abnormal trading volume and forecast accuracy. We also present evidence that analyst's forecast revisions are correlated with recent stock price performance, suggesting that security analysts use publicly available information to revise their earnings forecasts.

The existing literature attributes the recent decay of stock market anomalies to increased arbitrage activities (e.g., Chordia, Subrahmanyam, and Tong, 2014; McLean and Pontiff, 2016; Green, Hand, and Zhang, 2017). In this paper, we present evidence that the apparent demise of several prominent classes of stock market anomalies is better explained by changes in underlying fundamentals. The attenuation of anomalies in the Momentum, Investment, and Profitability categories are accompanied by a reduced difference in fundamental performance between the long- and short-leg portfolios, as measured by the fundamental return from a two-capital investment CAPM. After accounting for the change in fundamental return, the attenuation of Investment and Profitability anomalies decreases to statistically insignificant levels. These results are consistent with the q-theory of investment, which attributes the attenuation of stock returns and fundamental returns of anomalies to the time variation in discount rates implied by fundamentals. We also show that neither academic publication nor proxies for increased arbitrage activities can explain the attenuation of these anomalies.