Although it is of interest to test whether or not a particular asset pricing model is literally true, a more useful task for empirical researchers is to determine how wrong a model is and to compare the performance of competing asset pricing models. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to...

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of tests for mean-variance spanning. Under the popular regression framework of Huberman and Kandel (1987), we provide geometric interpretations of three asymptotic tests (likelihood ratio, Wald, and Lagrange multiplier) of mean-variance spanning....

Under the assumption of multivariate normality of asset returns, this paper presents a geometric interpretation and the finite-sample distributions of the sample Hansen-Jagannathan bounds on the variance of admissible stochastic discount factors, with and without the nonnegativity constraint on...

Over the years, many asset pricing studies have employed the sample cross-sectional regression (CSR) R2 as a measure of model performance. We derive the asymptotic distribution of this statistic and develop associated model comparison tests, taking into account the inevitable impact of model...

In this paper, we discuss the impact of different formulations of asset pricing models on the outcome of specification tests that are performed using excess returns. We point out that the popular way of specifying the stochastic discount factor (SDF) as a linear function of the factors is...

In this paper, we present a finite sample analysis of the sample minimum-variance frontier under the assumption that the returns are independent and multivariate normally distributed. We show that the sample minimum-variance frontier is a highly biased estimator of the population frontier and we...

Sample autocorrelation coefficients are widely used to test the randomness of a time series. Despite its unsatisfactory performance, the asymptotic normal distribution is often used to approximate the distribution of the sample autocorrelation coefficients. This is mainly due to the lack of an...

The top-order zonal polynomials <italic>C</italic>(<italic>A</italic>), and top-order invariant polynomials <italic>C</italic>_null_,…,<italic>null</italic> (<italic>A</italic>₁, …, <italic>A</italic>) in which each of the partitions of <italic>k</italic>, <italic>i</italic> = 1, …, <italic>r</italic>, has only one part, occur frequently in multivariate distribution theory, and econometrics — see, for example, Phillips (1980, <italic>Econometrica</italic>...