We review the international finance literature to assess the extent to which international factors affect financial asset demands and prices. International asset-pricing models with mean-variance investors predict that an asset's risk premium depends on its covariance with the world market...

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...

Neoclassical financial models provide the foundation for our understanding of finance. This chapter introduces the main ideas of neoclassical finance in a single-period context that avoids the technical difficulties of continuous-time models, but preserves the principal intuitions of the...

In this paper we survey the theoretical and empirical literatures on market liquidity. We organize both literatures around three basic questions: (a) how to measure illiquidity, (b) how illiquidity relates to underlying market imperfections and other asset characteristics, and (c) how...

This chapter provides a perspective on the rapidly developing literature on investment performance evaluation. I use the stochastic discount factor approach to present and critique current performance measurement techniques in a unified setting. I offer a number of suggestions to improve...

The last 15 years has brought forth an explosion of research on consumption-based asset pricing as a leading contender for explaining aggregate stock market behavior. This research has propelled further interest in consumption-based asset pricing, as well as some debate. This chapter surveys the...