Should I use common equity or total equity for book value? (when replicating Lewellen's 2015 paper)

[Julien Maas]

Dear Stata Community,

I'd hereby would like to ask if any of you know whether I should use common equity or the total equity value, when computing monthly BM ratio's as done by Lewellen is his 2015 paper on a cross section of expected stock returns.

Full reference;
Lewellen, J. (2015). The cross-section of expected stock returns. Critical Finance Review, 4(1), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1561/104.00000024

Accessible at;
https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/i...ockReturns.pdf

I believe he is only looking at common stocks, yet at the same time to calculate the market value of equity I can only find the shares outstanding of all public shares on a monthly basis in CRSP.

Thank you in advance,

Kind regards, Julien Maas

PS. I already posted this on Stackexchange, yet I recieved no response there in 5 days. So I decided to also post it here.

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Julien:
please see the FAQ point 13. How should I give literature references?. Thanks.

[Julien Maas]

Dear Mr Lazzaro,

My apologies.

Thank you for correcting me, I edited the post to now include the full reference and access link.

Kind regards, Julien Maas.

[Nick Cox]

I already posted this on Stackexchange, yet I recieved no response there in 5 days. So I decided to also post it here.

URL?

I hope you posted on a site focused on economics or finance. There will be some people here who work with your kind of data, but presumably more on a specialist website.

[Julien Maas]

Dear professor Cox,

I posted on the Quantitative Finance part of Stackexchange, here's the link to post;

https://quant.stackexchange.com/ques...eplicating-lew

Kind regards, Julien Maas.

[Nick Cox]

Thanks for the link. I don't know myself even what the terms mean or how difficult the question is. I am active at Stack Exchange on Cross Validated and Stack Overflow (Stata questions only!) but have no idea how that site behaves.