The risk premia assigned to economic (nontraded) risk factors can be decomposed into three parts: (i) the risk premia on maximum-correlation portfolios mimicking the factors; (ii) (minus) the covariance between the nontraded components of the candidate pricing kernel of a given model and the...

This paper derives explicit expressions for the asymptotic variances of the maximum likelihood and continuously updated GMM estimators under potentially misspecified models. The proposed misspecification-robust variance estimators allow the researcher to conduct valid inference on the model...

We provide an in-depth analysis of the theoretical properties of the Hansen-Jagannathan (HJ) distance that incorporates a no-arbitrage constraint. Under a multivariate elliptical distribution assumption, we present explicit expressions for the HJ-distance with a no-arbitrage constraint, the...

We show that in misspecified models with useless factors (for example, factors that are independent of the returns on the test assets), the standard inference procedures tend to erroneously conclude, with high probability, that these irrelevant factors are priced and the restrictions of the...

This paper studies some seemingly anomalous results that arise in possibly misspecified and unidentified linear asset-pricing models estimated by maximum likelihood and one-step generalized method of moments (GMM). Strikingly, when useless factors (that is, factors that are independent of the...