Recent studies document strong empirical support for multifactor models that aim to explain the cross-sectional variation in corporate bond expected excess returns. We revisit these findings and provide evidence that common factor pricing in corporate bonds is exceedingly difficult to establish....

He, Kelly and Manela (2017, HKM) offer strong empirical support to innovations in the equity capital ratio of the New York Federal Reserve (NY Fed) primary dealers as a priced risk factor across major asset classes. This leads them to conclude that primary dealers are special marginal investors...

What is a market friction? In the context of the capital asset pricing model, this article defines a financial market friction as anything that interferes with trade. This interference includes two dimensions. First, financial market frictions cause a market participant to deviate from holding...

This paper is concerned with statistical inference and model evaluation in possibly misspecified and unidentified linear asset-pricing models estimated by maximum likelihood and one-step generalized method of moments. Strikingly, when spurious factors (that is, factors that are uncorrelated with...

We show how to conduct asymptotically valid tests of model comparison when the extent of model mispricing is gauged by the squared Sharpe ratio improvement measure. This is equivalent to ranking models on their maximum Sharpe ratios, effectively extending the GRS test to accommodate comparison...

This paper is concerned with statistical inference and model evaluation in possibly misspecified and unidentified linear asset-pricing models estimated by maximum likelihood and one-step generalized method of moments. Strikingly, when spurious factors (that is, factors that are uncorrelated with...

Building on the Shanken (1992) estimator, we develop a new methodology for estimating and testing beta-pricing models when a large number of assets N is available but the number of time-series observations is small. We show empirically that our large N framework can change substantially common...