Practitioners needing estimates of a firm's equity cost of capital have long relied on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Recent evidence casts renewed doubt on the validity of the CAPM and beta. However, there is not much evidence to gauge the importance of the rejections of the CAPM in a...

We develop asset pricing models' implications for portfolio efficiency with conditioning information in the form of lagged instruments. A model identifies a portfolio that should be minimum-variance efficient with respect to the conditioning information. Our framework refines tests of portfolio...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

This paper makes indirect inference about the time variation in expected stock returns by comparing unconditional sample variances to estimates of expected conditional variances. The evidence reveals more predictability as more information is used, and there is no evidence that predictability...