The Bias of Growth Opportunity

The bias of growth opportunity (BGO), measured as the difference between market and fundamental values of a firm's growth opportunity, has an ability to predict future stock returns. In the portfolio sort, downward-biased BGO firms earn higher returns than upward-biased ones, which is unexplained by the common asset pricing models. Cross-sectional regression results also confirm BGO's power in predicting stock returns. To explain the anomaly, we show that the BGO premium is more pronounced when investor sentiment is high or when limits-to-arbitrage is severe, which suggests that the urn:x-wiley:13547798:media:eufm12323:eufm12323-math-0001 is more likely to capture behavioural biases than systematic risk.