Stocks of firms with cash flows concentrated in the short term (i.e., short duration stocks) pay a large premium over long duration stocks. I empirically demonstrate that this premium (i) is long-lived and strong even among large firms, (ii) subsumes the value and profitability premia, and (iii) exposes investors to variation in expected returns, especially in times when the premium is high. These facts are consistent with an intertemporal model in which the marginal (long-term) investor dislikes expected return declines as they lead to lower expected wealth growth. The model also captures the positive relation between risk premia and bond duration.

The equity term structure is downward sloping at long maturities. I estimate an Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) to show that the trade‐off between market and reinvestment risk explains this pattern. Intuitively, while long‐term dividend claims are highly exposed to market risk, they are good hedges for reinvestment risk because dividend prices rise as expected returns decline, and longer‐term claims are more sensitive to discount rates. In the estimated ICAPM, reinvestment risk dominates at long maturities, inducing relatively low risk premia on long‐term dividend claims. The model is also consistent with the equity term structure cyclicality and the upward‐sloping bond term structure.

Recent evidence indicates the value premium declined over time. We argue this decline happened because book equity, BE, is no longer a good proxy for fundamental equity, FE, defined as the present value of cash flows under a common discount rate across firms. Specifically, we estimate FE for public US firms over time and find that the premium associated with the fundamental-to-market ratio, FE/ME, subsumes the BE/ME premium and has been relatively stable while the cross-sectional correlation between FE/ME and BE/ME decreased over time, inducing an apparent decline in the value premium. We also show that FE/ME captures the value premium better than several alternative value signals beyond BE/ME.

A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns. Working capital forms a separate productive input besides physical capital. The model simultaneously fits the value, momentum, investment, and profitability premiums and partially explains positive stock-fundamental return correlations, the procyclical and short-term dynamics of the momentum and profitability premiums, and the countercyclical and long-term dynamics of the value and investment premiums. However, the model falls short in explaining momentum crashes. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online..

Funds investing in illiquid assets report returns with spurious autocorrelation. Consequently, investors need to unsmooth these funds’ returns when evaluating their risk exposures. We show that funds with similar investments share a common source of spurious autocorrelation not fully resolved by traditional unsmoothing methods and thereby leading to underestimation of systematic risk. Thus, we propose a generalized unsmoothing technique and apply it to hedge funds and private commercial real estate funds. Our method significantly improves the measurement of funds’ risk exposures and risk-adjusted performance, especially for highly illiquid funds. Overall, the average illiquid fund alpha is lower than previously thought.

Most firms deleverage from their historical peak market-leverage (ML) ratios to near-zero ML, while also markedly increasing cash balances to high levels. Among 4, 476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data, median ML is 0.543 at the peak and 0.026 at the later trough, with a six-year median time from peak to trough and with debt repayment and earnings retention accounting for 93.7% of the median peak-to-trough decline in ML. The findings support theories in which firms deleverage to restore ample financial flexibility and are difficult to reconcile with most firms having materially positive leverage targets. Received November 17, 2016; editorial decision November 9, 2017 by Editor David Denis.