This paper documents a robust new fact about the cross section of stock returns: stocks of companies with higher past production efficiency earn significantly higher average returns in the future. The return difference between the high production efficiency and the low production efficiency portfolio is 25.7% annually, after adjusted for exposures to the market return, size, value and momentum factor. The production efficiency retains its forecasting capability even on large capitalization stocks, and the abnormal return associated with the production efficiency is the strongest within small capitalization stocks. The predicting power of the production efficiency is more persistent for large capitalization stocks than for small capitalization stocks. The empirical finding casts doubt on the measures that use the firm's productivity as one of the determinants to assess the firm's financial constraint.

Solutions to the equity premium puzzle should inform us about the cross-section of stock returns. An external habit model with heterogeneous firms reproduces numerous stylized facts about both the equity premium and the value premium. The equity premium is large, time-varying, and linked with consumption volatility. The cross-section of expected returns is log-linear in B/M, and the slope matches the data. The explanation for the value pre-mium lies in the interaction between the cross-section of cash flows and the time-varying risk premium. Value firms are temporarily low produc-tivity firms, which will eventually experience high cash flows. The present value of these temporally distant cash flows is sensitive to risk premium movements. The value premium is the reward for bearing this sensitivity. Empirical evidence verifies that value firms have higher cash-flow growth. The data also show that value stock returns are more sensitive to risk premium movements, as measured by consumption volatility shocks.

This volume, inspired by and dedicated to the work of pioneering investment analyst, Jack Treynor, addresses the issues of portfolio risk and return and how investment portfolios are measured. In a career spanning over fifty years, the primary questions addressed by Jack Treynor were: Is there an observable risk-return trade-off? How can stock selection models be integrated with risk models to enhance client returns? Do managed portfolios earn positive, and statistically significant, excess returns and can mutual fund managers time the market? Since the publication of a pair of seminal Harvard Business Review articles in the mid-1960’s, Jack Treynor has developed thinking that has greatly influenced security selection, portfolio construction and measurement, and market efficiency. Key publications addressed such topics as the Capital Asset Pricing Model and stock selection modeling and integration with risk models. Treynor also served as editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, through which he wrote many columns across a wide spectrum of topics. This volume showcases original essays by leading researchers and practitioners exploring the topics that have interested Treynor while applying the most current methodologies. Such topics include the origins of portfolio theory, market timing, and portfolio construction in equity markets. The result not only reinforces Treynor’s lasting contributions to the field but suggests new areas for research and analysis.

A growing number of empirical studies suggest that betas of common stocks do not adequately explain cross-sectional differences in stock returns. Instead, a number of other variables (e.g., size, ratio of book to market, earnings/price) that have no basis in extant theoretical models seem to have significantly predictive ability. Some interpret the findings as evidence of market efficiency. Others argue that the Capital Asset Pricing Model is an incomplete description of equilibrium price formation and these variables are proxies for additional risk factors. In this paper we review the evidence on the cross-sectional behavior of common stock returns on the U.S. and other equity markets around the world. We also report some new evidence on these cross-sectional relations using data from both U.S. and international stock markets. We find, among other results, that although the return premia associated with these ad hoc variables are significant in most international stock markets, the premia are uncorrelated across markets. The accumulating evidence prompts the following question: If these return premia occur primarily in January and are uncorrelated across major international equity markets, is it reasonable to characterize them as compensation for risk?

Labor productivity, measured as the industry-standardized ratio of sales to number of employees, has an ability to predict average stock returns. In the portfolio sort, firms with high labor productivity earn higher expected returns than those with low productivity. The difference in returns is unexplained by the risk-adjusted asset pricing models. In the cross-section, labor productivity remains as a significant predictor of stock returns after adjusting for size, book-to-market, momentum, asset growth, and profitability.