This study examines investment-cash flow (ICF) sensitivity across international markets and shows that the sensitivity has been stable in poor countries, but has experienced a sharp decline over time in firms located in rich countries. Our results suggest that the growing wealth of economies worldwide and relaxation of financial constraints at the firm level have led to the disappearance of ICF sensitivity in rich, highly developed countries but not in poor developing ones. We show that access to external finance, especially equity finance, is a key channel through which country-level development affects the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flow. Our evidence suggests that the amount of available economic resources and allocation efficiency are two necessary conditions that ensure the viability of the equity channel.

This paper introduces a regime-switching combination approach to predict excess stock returns. The approach explicitly incorporates model uncertainty, regime uncertainty, and parameter uncertainty. The empirical findings reveal that the regime-switching combination forecasts of excess returns deliver consistent out-of-sample forecasting gains relative to the historical average and the Rapach et al. (2010) combination forecasts. The findings also reveal that two regimes are related to the business cycle. Based on the business cycle explanation of regimes, excess returns are found to be more predictable during economic contractions than during expansions. Finally, return forecasts are related to the real economy, thus providing insights on the economic sources of return predictability.

In light of inconclusive evidence on the relation between market volatility and stock returns, this paper proposes a multi-factor volatility model and examines its impact on cross-sectional pricing. We also evaluate the out-of-sample performance and economic significance of multi-factor volatility. We find that conditional variances of the size and value dynamic factor earn significant and positive variance risk premia. In addition, multi-factor volatility can significantly improve the out-of-sample return predictability with a positive economic gain in asset allocation.