Investment and The Cross-Section of Equity Returns
By Gian Luca Clementi and Dino Palazzo
Journal
of Finance, Volume 74, Issue 1, February 2019, pages 281-321
Abstract
The data show that, upon being hit by adverse profitability shocks, large
public firms have ample latitude to divest their least productive assets,
reducing the risk faced by shareholders and the returns that they are likely to
demand. In the one-factor production-based asset pricing model, when the
frictions to capital adjustment are shaped to respect the evidence on
investment, the model-generated cross-sectional dispersion of returns is only a
small fraction of that documented in the data. Our conclusions hold even when
operating or labor leverage are modeled in ways shown to be promising in the
extant literature.