Mimicking portfolios have long been useful in asset pricing research. In most empirical applications, the portfolio weights are assumed to be fixed over time, while in theory they may be functions of the economic state. This paper derives and characterizes mimicking portfolios in the presence of...

This paper studies the estimation of asset pricing model regressions with conditional alphas and betas, focusing on the joint effects of data snooping and spurious regression. We find that the regressions are reasonably well specified for conditional betas, even in settings where simple...

We present a new methodology for estimating time-varying conditional skewness. Our model allows for changing means and variances, uses a maximum likelihood framework with instruments, and assumes a non-central <italic>t</italic> distribution. We apply this method to daily, weekly, and monthly stock returns, and...