The Frankfurt-based ACATIS Investment Kapitalverwaltungsgesellschaft mbH specializes in value investing and has been funding scientific work in this area for more than a decade and a half. In the opinion of its founder and managing director, Dr. Hendrik Leber, many aspects are not yet sufficiently researched or could be further improved.
Quynh Pham has achieved an excellent 2nd place of this year's competition with a prize reward of €2,000 for her paper “Stock Return Predictability: Evidence Across US Industries”. The main finding of this paper is that there exists a long-term return predictability heterogeneity over US industries, in which stock returns are more predictable in sectors with a large average firm size such as tobacco, petroleum and natural gas and less so in small sectors, such as coal, steel, and construction materials. In light of the dividend-smoothing hypothesis, this paper presents supporting evidence for a higher dividend smoothness in large industries than in small ones, which in turn drives cross-industry predictive patterns. The paper further suggests that dividend yields are not good proxies for predicting returns in some small industries.
Further information on the ACATIS-Value-Award 2020, the winners, the summaries of the award-winning scientific papers, and the press release on the 18th ACATIS-Value-Award can be found here.