Over the years, a number of financial market anomalies have been uncovered by academics and financial market professionals. Anomalies are return patterns than do not conform to the standard asset pricing models. A very basic paradigm in finance is that riskier assets should earn higher expected returns. Our asset pricing models (for instance, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, CAPM) relate risk to expected returns. However, the anomalies suggest that there are other stock attributes (such as firm size, past returns, the book-to-market ratio, asset growth, profitability, etc.) that have an impact on returns even though they are unrelated to risk. One such attribute or firm characteristic is firm rating (obtained from bond ratings). In the data, we find that higher rated, lower risk firms earn higher returns than lower rated or higher risk firms. This is indeed a puzzle since it violates the basic risk-return paradigm of finance.

Professor Chordia has been working on this for the past 20 years and will provide an overview and discuss key findings in this literature.