In a frictionless world, investment is perfectly elastic to changes in the discount rate. With financial frictions, investment is less elastic, meaning that a given magnitude of change in investment is associated with a higher magnitude of change in the discount rate. Equivalently, investment is...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their capital investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-rate hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increases with the...

In the investment theory, firms with high expected investment growth earn higher expected returns than firms with low expected investment growth, holding investment and expected profitability constant. Building on cross-sectional growth forecasts with Tobin's q, operating cash flows, and change...

Embedding disasters into a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms induces strong nonlinearity in the pricing kernel, helping explain the empirical failure of the (consumption) CAPM. Our single-factor model reproduces the failure of the CAPM in explaining the value premium in finite...

A new class of Capital Asset Pricing Models (CAPM) arises from the first principle of real investment for individual firms. Conceptually as ‘causal' as the consumption CAPM, yet empirically more tractable, the investment CAPM emerges as a leading asset pricing paradigm. Firms do a good job in...

Many recently proposed, seemingly different factor models are closely related. In spanning tests, the q-factor model largely subsumes the Fama-French 5- and 6-factor models, and the q^5 model subsumes the Stambaugh-Yuan 4-factor model. Their “mispricing” factors are sensitive to the...

The neoclassical theory of investment implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity (two major components of the marginal benefit of...

An empirical q-factor model consisting of the market factor, a size factor, an investment factor, and a profitability factor largely summarizes the cross section of average stock returns. A comprehensive examination of nearly 80 anomalies reveals that about one-half of the anomalies are...

We propose a new multifactor model that consists of the market factor and factor mimicking portfolios based on investment and productivity motivated from neoclassical reasoning. The neoclassical three-factor model goes a long way in explaining the average returns across testing portfolios formed...

The neoclassical q-theory is a good start to understand the cross section of returns. Under constant return to scale, stock returns equal levered investment returns that are tied directly with characteristics. This equation generates the relations of average returns with book-to-market,...