Three Essays On Information And Asset Pricing PDF Download

This dissertation consists of three essays on asset pricing. The first essay examines the return information conveyed by a firm's dividend deviation, defined as the difference between a firm's actual dividend per share (DPS) and its target DPS. We find that underpaying stocks (i.e., stocks in the lowest dividend deviation quintile) provide 5.4% more annualized risk-adjusted return compared to overpaying stocks (i.e., stocks in the highest dividend deviation quintile). A dividend deviation factor carries a risk premium of 5.64% per annum and is a proxy for systematic risk that is not captured by existing factor models. Potential explanations include financial constraints and overinvestments. Compared with overpaying firms, underpaying firms are more financially constrained and thus generate higher returns. After large investments, underpaying firms significantly underperform compared to their peers while overpaying firms remain statistically indifferent from their peers. In the second essay, we examine the relationship between firms' individual disagreement and the aggregate disagreement. We find a commonality in firms' individual disagreements exists at the market level, industry level, and geographic level. This commonality increases with firm's asymmetric information, uncertainty, and the degree of coverage, but decreases with firm's accounting information quality. We find a positive relation between the commonality in disagreement and stock returns. A higher disagreement commonality may indicate lower usefulness of firm-specific information that strengthens the synchronicity between firm's stock return and market return. In the third essay, we examine the effect of macro disagreement on stock returns in an international context. All G7 countries except Italy show a significant local disagreement beta effect, which is robust with respect to both size and value effects. Moreover, the macro disagreement on the U.S. economy shows a strong spillover effect on all non-U.S. G7 countries. The degree of a country's spillover effect is largely and positively in line with the magnitude of its trading activities with the U.S. Our paper demonstrates the pervasiveness of a disagreement beta effect, suggesting that investors bet against each other on macro disagreement not only in the U.S., but also in other major G7 countries.