Model selection, i.e., the choice of an asset pricing model to the exclusion of competing models, is an inherently misguided strategy when the true model is unavailable to the researcher. This paper illustrates the advantages of a model pooling approach in characterizing the cross section of...

This paper re-examines the tests of the Sharpe-Lintner Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The null that the CAPM intercepts are zero is tested for ten size-based stock portfolios and for twenty five book-to-market sorted portfolios using five-year, ten-year and longer sub-periods during...

The ICAPM implies that the market's conditional expected return is proportional to its conditional variance and that the reward-to-risk ratio equals the representative investor's coefficient of relative risk aversion. Prior studies examine this relation using the stock market to proxy for...

Prior studies find that a strategy that buys high-beta stocks and sells low-beta stocks has a significantly negative unconditional Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) alpha, such that it appears to pay to "bet against beta." We show, however, that the conditional beta for the high-minus-low beta...

We introduce a hierarchical Bayes approach to model conditional firm-level alphas as a function of firm characteristics. Our empirical framework is motivated by growing concerns in the literature regarding the reliability of inferences from portfolio-based methods. In our initial tests, we...