In this paper, we use earnings forecasts from a cross-sectional model instead of analysts’ forecasts to proxy for
cash flow expectations and estimate the implied cost of capital (ICC) for more than 170,000 firm-year observations over
1968–2008. Our cross-sectional earnings model captures significant variation in future earnings performance across firms
using ex ante publicly available information. More importantly, the model produces earnings forecasts that are superior to
consensus analyst forecasts in terms of coverage, forecast bias, and earnings response coefficient. We show that the ICC
estimated using the model-based earnings forecasts is a more reliable proxy for expected returns than the ICC based on
analysts’ forecasts.
Our results are robust to different specifications of the cross-sectional earnings model, to adjusting for the predictable
component of analysts’ forecast bias, and to different methods used to estimate the ICC. In addition, we show that the
relative performance of the model-based earnings forecasts and ICC over analysts’ forecasts and the analyst-based ICC is
more pronounced for firms with a relatively poor information environment, thus highlighting the group of firms for which
one can benefit the most from using our model-based earnings forecasts and the associated ICC.
We use our new and improved ICC estimates to re-examine the cross-sectional relation between a broad set of firmlevel
characteristics and ex ante expected returns. Our results suggest that using the model-based ICC instead of realized
returns as a proxy for expected returns has a significant impact on inferences about the cross-section of expected returns.