The extent to which push and pull factors affect international capital flows is widely debated. We contribute to this strand of literature by estimating the relative importance of push and pull factors for portfolio flows over a time span, encompassing the global financial crisis, the European...

This paper considers extensions of 2-dimensional factor models to higher-dimension data that can be represented as tensors. I describe decompositions of tensors that generalize the standard matrix singular value decomposition and principal component analysis to higher dimensions. I estimate the...

Despite the weak theoretical assumptions needed to guarantee the existence of a factor model that prices the cross-section of stock returns we show in a meta-analysis of fifteen state-of-the-art models that none of these models can price the mean-variance efficient portfolio of the other...

I develop a hybrid methodology that incorporates an econometric identification strategy into artificial neural networks when studying conditional latent factor models. The time-varying betas are assumed to be unknown functions of numerous firm characteristics, and the statistical factors are...

This paper examines the applicability of the bootstrap approach to test for irrelevant risk factors that are potentially useless in misspecified linear stochastic discount factor (SDF) models. In the literature, the misspecification-robust inference with useless factors is known to give rise...

This paper introduces a simple and tractable sieve estimation of semiparametric conditional factor models with latent factors. We establish large-$N$-asymptotic properties of the estimators and the tests without requiring large $T$. We also develop a simple bootstrap procedure for conducting...

We survey recent methodological contributions in asset pricing using factor models and machine learning. We organize these results based on their primary objectives: estimating expected returns, factors, risk exposures, risk premia, and the stochastic discount factor, as well as model comparison...