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Working Paper
The human capital that matters: expected returns and the income of affluent households
We implement the human capital CAPM (HCAPM) using the income growth of high income households, rather than aggregate income growth, to proxy the return to human capital (HCRT). We find that identifying the HCRT with the income growth of affluent households, those who are most likely to hold stocks, substantially improves the performance of the HCAPM. Specifically, the pricing errors, R-square?s, average returns on factor mimicking portfolios, and performance relative to other macro-finance models uniformly improve as the HCRT is identified with the income growth of successively more affluent ...
Report
Econometric evaluation of asset pricing models
We provide a brief review of the techniques that are based on the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and used for evaluating capital asset pricing models. We first develop the CAPM and multi-beta models and discuss the classical two-stage regression method originally used to evaluate them. We then describe the pricing kernel representation of a generic asset pricing model; this representation facilitates use of the GMM in a natural way for evaluating the conditional and unconditional versions of most asset pricing models. We also discuss diagnostic methods that provide additional insights.
Report
The conditional CAPM and the cross-section of expected returns
Most empirical studies of the static CAPM assume that betas remain constant over time and that the return on the value-weighted portfolio of all stocks is a proxy for the return on aggregate wealth. The general consensus is that the static CAPM is unable to explain satisfactorily the cross-section of average returns on stocks. We assume that the CAPM holds in a conditional sense, i.e., betas and the market risk premium vary over time. We include the return on human capital when measuring the return on aggregate wealth. Our specification performs well in explaining the cross-section of average ...
Working Paper
Risk aversion vs. intertemporal substitution: identification failure in the intertemporal consumption CAPM
Is the risk aversion parameter in the simple intertemporal consumption CAPM ?small? as in Hansen and Singleton (1982,1983), or is it that its reciprocal, the intertemporal elasticity of substitution, is small, as in Hall (1988)? This paper attributes the disparate estimates of this fundamental parameter not only to failures of instrument admissibility as do Hall (1988) and Hansen-Singleton (1996), but rather to failures of instrument relevance. That is, the disparate estimates reflect near nonidentification due to the unpredictability of asset returns and consumption growth. One natural ...
Journal Article
Asset returns and economic risk
The capital asset pricing model (CAPM), favored by financial researchers and practitioners fifteen years ago, holds that the extra return on a risky asset comes from bearing market risk only. But newer evidence supports the intertemporal CAPM (I-CAPM) theory (Merton 1973), which suggests that the premium on any risky asset is related not only to market risk but also to additional economic variables. ; This article reviews and interprets recent advances in the asset pricing literature. The study seeks to shed light on the sources of economic risk that investors should track and hedge against ...
Report
Assessing specification errors in stochastic discount factor models
In this paper we develop alternative ways to compare asset pricing models when it is understood that their implied stochastic discount factors do not price all portfolios correctly. Unlike comparisons based on chi-squared statistics associated with null hypotheses that models are correct, our measures of model performance do not reward variability of discount factor proxies. One of our measures is designed to exploit fully the implications of arbitrage-free pricing of derivative claims. We demonstrate empirically the usefulness of methods in assessing some alternative stochastic factor models ...
Working Paper
Breathing room for beta
This paper argues that a test of beta insignificance, commonly used in empirical studies of the CAPM, predisposes studies toward rejecting the CAPM. Under the null hypothesis of these tests, the CAPM is false. Consequently, insufficient evidence to reject the null is taken as sufficient evidence to reject the CAPM. Simulations suggest that this framework typically leads to false rejection rates of more than 1/2. An alternative test, with a null hypothesis consistent with the CAPM, is proposed. Based on statistics from published studies, the proposed test does not reject the CAPM.
Working Paper
Market proxies, correlation, and relative mean-variance efficiency: still living with the roll critique
A pricing restriction is developed to test the validity of the CAPM conditional on a prior belief about the correlation between the true market return and the proxy return used in the test. Distinguishing this pricing restriction from competing tests also based upon the relative efficiency of the proxy return is a consideration for the proxy's mismeasurement of the market return. Failure to account for this mismeasurement biases tests of the CAPM towards rejection by overstating the inefficiency of the proxy. A time-varying version of this pricing restriction links mismeasurement of the ...
Discussion Paper
Time-varying risk and international portfolio diversification with contagious bear markets
In this paper we estimate and test a conditional version of the international CAPM. By using a parsimonious parameterization recently proposed by Ding and Engle (1994), we allow risk premia, betas, and correlations to very through time and test the cross-section restrictions of the model using a relatively large number of assets. One advantage of our test is that it does not require the market weights to be observed in each period. In support of the international CAPM, we find that world-wide risk is priced whereas country-specific risk is not. Further, we find that the price of world risk is ...
Working Paper
Econometric tests of asset price bubbles: taking stock
Can asset price bubbles be detected? This survey of econometric tests of asset price bubbles shows that, despite recent advances, econometric detection of asset price bubbles cannot be achieved with a satisfactory degree of certainty. For each paper that finds evidence of bubbles, there is another one that fits the data equally well without allowing for a bubble. We are still unable to distinguish bubbles from time-varying or regime-switching fundamentals, while many small sample econometrics problems of bubble tests remain unresolved.