Returns Premia on Company Fundamentals

This paper studies the excess returns on stocks, associated to various company fundamentals on a panel of US stocks from 1979 to 2008. The returns premia are measured using a random coefficient panel data model on the individual stock level. We show that the HML and SMB factors in the Fama and French model probably have no particular economic meaning as sources of systematic risk other than being proxies for the impact of the book-to-price and size characteristics. While the book-to-price ratio, market capitalization, past year sales growth and the share of reinvested profits generate significant premia, earnings history and forecasts are of little predictive power. We statistically confirm the time-varying nature of the style premia but find no strong evidence for the value and growth momentum in a multivariate setting when the systematic risk is controlled for. Some of the premia are positively correlated with the market return and between each other, while others seem to be unrelated. Variations in premia associated with companies’ high internal growth and growth of sales are positively correlated between each other, with the market return and with the value premium. Variations of the size premium are probably driven by different factors.