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Working Paper
Mimicking portfolios, economic risk premia, and tests of multi-beta models
This paper considers two alternative formulations of the linear factor model (LFM) with nontraded factors. The first formulation is the traditional LFM, where the estimation of risk premia and alphas is performed by means of a cross-sectional regression of average returns on betas. The second formulation (LFM*) replaces the factors with their projections on the span of excess returns. This formulation requires only time-series regressions for the estimation of risk premia and alphas. We compare the theoretical properties of the two approaches and study the small-sample properties of estimates ...
Working Paper
Spurious Inference in Unidentified Asset-Pricing Models
This paper studies some seemingly anomalous results that arise in possibly misspecified and unidentified linear asset-pricing models estimated by maximum likelihood and one-step generalized method of moments (GMM). Strikingly, when useless factors (that is, factors that are independent of the returns on the test assets) are present, the models exhibit perfect fit, as measured by the squared correlation between the model's fitted expected returns and the average realized returns, and the tests for correct model specification have asymptotic power that is equal to the nominal size. In other ...
Working Paper
Model comparison using the Hansen-Jagannathan distance
Although it is of interest to empirical researchers to test whether or not a particular asset-pricing model is true, a more useful task is to determine how wrong a model is and to compare the performance of competing asset-pricing models. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to test whether two competing linear asset-pricing models have the same Hansen-Jagannathan distance. We show that the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic depends on whether the competing models are correctly specified or misspecified and are nested or nonnested. In addition, given the increasing interest ...
Working Paper
Dynamic strategies, asset pricing models, and the out-of-sample performance of the tangency portfolio
In this paper, I study the behavior of an investor with unit risk aversion who maximizes a utility function defined over the mean and the variance of a portfolio's return. Conditioning information is accessible without cost and an unconditionally riskless asset is available in the market. ; The proposed approach makes it possible to compare the performance of a benchmark tangency portfolio (formed from the set of unrestricted estimates of portfolio weights) to the performance of a restricted tangency portfolio which uses single-index and multi-index asset pricing models to constrain the first ...
Working Paper
Asset-pricing models and economic risk premia: a decomposition
The risk premia assigned to economic (nontraded) risk factors can be decomposed into three parts: (i) the risk premia on maximum-correlation portfolios mimicking the factors; (ii) (minus) the covariance between the nontraded components of the candidate pricing kernel of a given model and the factors; and (iii) (minus) the mispricing assigned by the candidate pricing kernel to the maximum-correlation mimicking portfolios. The first component is the same across asset-pricing models and is typically estimated with little (absolute) bias and high precision. The second component, on the other ...
Working Paper
A note on the estimation of asset pricing models using simple regression betas
Since Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) and Fama and MacBeth (1973), the two-pass cross-sectional regression (CSR) methodology has become the most popular tool for estimating and testing beta asset pricing models. In this paper, we focus on the case in which simple regression betas are used as regressors in the second-pass CSR. Under general distributional assumptions, we derive asymptotic standard errors of the risk premia estimates that are robust to model misspecification. When testing whether the beta risk of a given factor is priced, our misspecification robust standard error and the ...
Working Paper
Minimum-variance kernels, economic risk premia, and tests of multi-beta models
This paper uses minimum-variance (MV) admissible kernels to estimate risk premia associated with economic risk variables and to test multi-beta models. Estimating risk premia using MV kernels is appealing because it avoids the need to 1) identify all relevant sources of risk and 2) assume a linear factor model for asset returns. Testing multi-beta models in terms of restricted MV kernels has the advantage that 1) the candidate kernel has the smallest volatility and 2) test statistics are easy to interpret in terms of Sharpe ratios. The authors find that several economic variables command ...
Working Paper
The price of inflation and foreign exchange risk in international equity markets
In this paper the author formulates and tests an international intertemporal capital asset pricing model in the presence of deviations from purchasing power parity (II-CAPM [PPP]). He finds evidence in favor of at least mild segmentation of international equity markets in which only global market risk appears to be priced. When using the Hansen & Jagannathan (1991, 1997) variance bounds and distance measures as testing devices, the author finds that, while all international asset pricing models are formally rejected by the data, their pricing implications are substantially different. The ...
Working Paper
Pricing model performance and the two-pass cross-sectional regression methodology
Since Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) and Fama and MacBeth (1973), the two-pass cross-sectional regression (CSR) methodology has become the most popular approach for estimating and testing asset pricing models. Statistical inference with this method is typically conducted under the assumption that the models are correctly specified, that is, expected returns are exactly linear in asset betas. This assumption can be a problem in practice since all models are, at best, approximations of reality and are likely to be subject to a certain degree of misspecification. We propose a general ...
Journal Article
The news in financial asset returns
The notion that financial asset returns are predictors of future economic activity is widespread, but detailed analyses provide little support for financial markets? ability to reveal future economic activity. Even though the evidence on various indicators used by different researchers is mixed, the authors of this article explore the notion that financial markets reveal useful information about future economic activity. ; This article examines and answers two questions: First, what is a good way of extracting information about future economic activity from asset prices? Second, do financial ...