Higher Order Stochastic Dominance and Aggregate Investor Preferences

This paper finds necessary and sufficient conditions of Nth-order stochastic dominance (SD) for risk aversion and develops linear tests for Nth-order SD. We introduce a linear FDSD (fourth-order SD and decreasing absolute risk aversion SD) test for standard risk aversion. A positive research shows that higher order risk attitude cannot explain pricing errors of the small size and high value benchmark portfolios. The empirical results also suggests that any Nth-order SD criterion might not be superior to MV rule when the MV kernel does not violate non-satiation. FDSD has the best discriminate power and substantially improves the pricing kernel