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.

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.

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.