The stochastic discount factor (SDF) method provides a unified general framework for econometric analysis of asset-pricing models. There have been concerns that, compared to the classical beta method, the generality of the SDF method comes at the cost of efficiency in parameter estimation and...

Most empirical studies of the static capital asset pricing model (CAPM) assume that betas remain constant over time and that the return on the value-weighted portfolio of all stocks is a proxy for the return on aggregate wealth. The general consensus is that the static CAPM is unable to explain...

Without the assumption of conditional homoskedasticity, a general asymptotic distribution theory for the two-stage cross-sectional regression method shows that the standard errors produced by the Fama-MacBeth procedure do not necessarily overstate the precision of the risk premium estimates....

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Contingent capital (CC), which aims to internalize the costs of too-big-to-fail in the capital structure of large banks, has been under intense debate by policy makers and academics. We show that CC with a market trigger, in which direct stakeholders are unable to choose...</p>

We find that on average, an announcement of rising unemployment is good news for stocks during economic expansions and bad news during economic contractions. Unemployment news bundles three types of primitive information relevant for valuing stocks: information about future interest rates, the...

Knowledge of the one-month interest rate is useful in forecasting the sign, as well as the variance, of the excess return on stocks. The services of a portfolio manager who makes use of the forecasting model to shift funds between bills and stocks would be worth an annual management fee of 2...

Green and Hollifield (1992) argue that the presence of a dominant factor would result in extreme negative weights in mean-variance efficient portfolios even in the absence of estimation errors. In that case, imposing no-short-sale constraints should hurt, whereas empirical evidence is often to...