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The expected rate of equity returns is a central input into various managerial and investment decisions that affect the allocation of scarce resources. Research on capital markets has devoted significant effort to studying how and why expected returns vary over time and across firms. Cochrane (2011) called these questions the central organizing agenda in contemporary asset-pricing research.

At the heart of this research agenda lies a longstanding measurement problem: ex ante expected returns are unobservable and ex post realized returns are noisy proxies (Campbell 1991; Vuolteenaho 2002). Since Botosan (1997), the accounting literature offered a promising solution to this measurement problem: the development of a novel class of expected-return proxies (ERPs), collectively known as the implied cost of equity capital (ICC).