What capital allocation role can China’s stock market play? Counter to perception, stock prices in China have become as informative about future profits as they are in the US. This rise in stock price informativeness has coincided with an increase in investment efficiency among privately owned firms, suggesting the market is aggregating information and providing useful signals to managers. However, price informativeness and investment efficiency for state-owned enterprises fell below that of privately owned firms after the postcrisis stimulus, perhaps reflecting unpredictable subsidies and state-directed investment policy. Finally, evidence from realized returns suggests Chinese firms face a higher cost of equity capital than US firms.

Motivated by existing evidence of a preference among investors for assets with lottery-like payoffs and that many investors are poorly diversified, we investigate the significance of extreme positive returns in the cross-sectional pricing of stocks. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a negative and significant relation between the maximum daily return over the past one month (MAX) and expected stock returns. Average raw and risk-adjusted return differences between stocks in the lowest and highest MAX deciles exceed 1% per month. These results are robust to controls for size, book-to-market, momentum, short-term reversals, liquidity, and skewness. Of particular interest, including MAX reverses the puzzling negative relation between returns and idiosyncratic volatility recently shown in Ang et al., 2006, Ang et al., 2009.

[This article reexamines the autocorrelation patterns of short-horizon stock returns. We document empirical results which imply that these autocorrelations have been overstated in the existing literature. Based on several new insights, we provide support for a market efficiency-based explanation of the evidence. Our analysis suggests that institutional factors are the most likely source of the autocorrelation patterns.]

We show theoretically and empirically that the durations of corporate securities are monotonically related to their capital structure priority, with equity often having a negative duration. The magnitude of this effect increases with firm leverage. We use these insights to challenge existing results on stock-bond comovements and factor pricing. For example, though overlooked, higher leverage and lower priority reduce the correlation between corporate security and government bond returns, and these variables explain time-series and cross-sectional variation in correlations; traditional market model regressions significantly understate corporate bond betas; and regressions on standard term and default factors dramatically overstate interest rate and default risk.

The authors investigate the cross-sectional relation between industry-sorted stock returns and expected inflation, and they find that this relation is linked to cyclical movements in industry output. Stock returns of noncyclical industries tend to covary positively with expected inflation, while the reverse holds for cyclical industries. From a theoretical perspective, the authors describe a model that captures both (1) the cross-sectional variation in these relations across industries and (2) the negative and positive relation between stock returns and inflation at short and long horizons, respectively. The model is developed in an economic environment in which the spirit of the Fisher model is preserved.

Multivariate density estimation (MDE) suggests that mortgage-backed security (MBS) prices can be well described as a function of the level and slope of the term structure. We analyze how this function varies across MBSs with different coupons. An important finding is that the interest rate level proxies for the moneyness of the option, the expected level of prepayments, and the average life of the cash flows, while the term structure slope controls for the average rate at which these cash flows should be discounted. Though the origination and prepayment behavior of mortgages differ substantially across coupons, there remains an unexplained common factor in MBS prices. This factor does not seem to be related to the usual suspects and therefore presents a puzzle to financial economists.

We investigate the relation between returns on stock indices and their corresponding futures contracts to evaluate potential explanations for the pervasive yet anomalous evidence of positive, short-horizon portfolio autocorrelations. Using a simple theoretical framework, we generate empirical implications for both microstructure and partial adjustment models. The major findings are (i) return autocorrelations of indices are generally positive even though futures contracts have autocorrelations close to zero, and (ii) these autocorrelation differences are maintained under conditions favorable for spot-futures arbitrage and are most prevalent during low-volume periods. These results point toward microstructure-based explanations and away from explanations based on behavioral models.

The forward premium anomaly (exchange rate changes are negatively related to interest rate differentials) is one of the most robust puzzles in financial economics. We recast the underlying parity relation in terms of lagged forward interest rate differentials, documenting a reversal of the anomalous sign on the coefficient in the traditional specification. We show that this novel evidence is consistent with recent empirical models of exchange rates that imply exchange rate changes depend on two key variables: the interest rate differential and the magnitude of the deviation of the current exchange rate from that implied by purchasing power parity.

Evidence of excessive comovement among stocks following index additions (Barberis, Shleifer, and Wurgler, 2005) and stock splits (Green and Hwang, 2009) challenges traditional finance theory. We show that the bivariate regressions in this literature provide little information about the economic magnitude of excess comovement, with coefficients that are sensitive to unrelated factors. Using robust univariate regressions and matched control samples, almost all evidence of excess comovement disappears. In both examples, the stocks exhibit strong returns prior to the event, akin to momentum winners. We document that winner stocks exhibit increases in betas, generating much of the apparent excess comovement.

We investigate empirically the well-known put–call parity no-arbitrage relation in the presence of short sales restrictions. Violations of put–call parity are asymmetric in the direction of short sales constraints, and their magnitudes are strongly related to the cost and difficulty of short selling. These violations are also related to both the maturity of the option and the level of valuations in the stock market, consistent with a behavioral finance theory of over-optimistic stock investors and market segmentation. Moreover, both the size of put–call parity violations and the cost of short selling are significant predictors of future returns for individual stocks.