Patricia M Dechow
University of Michigan
Richard G. Sloan
University of Michigan
Mark T. Soliman
University of Michigan
Abstract: Duration is an important and well-established risk characteristic for fixed income securities. We use recent developments in financial statement analysis research to construct a measure of duration for equity securities. We find that the standard empirical predictions and results for fixed income securities extend to equity securities. Stock price volatility and stock beta are both increasing in equity duration. Moreover, estimates of common shocks to expected equity returns extracted using our measure of equity duration capture a strong common factor in stock returns. Additional analysis shows that the book-to-market ratio provides a crude measure of equity duration and that our more refined measure of equity duration dominates and subsumes the Fama and French (1993) book-to-market factor in stock returns. Our research shows how structured financial statement analysis can be used to construct superior measures of equity security risk.
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