Robust estimation techniques based on symmetric probability distributions are often substituted for OLS to obtain efficient regression parameters with thick-tail distributed data. The empirical, simulation and theoretical results in this paper show that with skewed distributed data, symmetric...

Beta-sorted portfolios - portfolios comprised of assets with similar covariation to selected risk factors - are a popular tool in empirical finance to analyze models of (conditional) expected returns. Despite their widespread use, little is known of their statistical properties in contrast to...

The relation between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns is currently a topic of debate in the academic literature. So far the evidence regarding the relation is mixed. This study aims to investigate the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns in the Indian stock...

Researchers typically employ cross-sectional regression methods to identify firm-level characteristics that help to explain the cross-section of average stock returns. I develop a straightforward approach for testing whether the coefficient estimates produced by these methods satisfy the pricing...

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

We improve on the Instrumented Principal Component Analysis (IPCA) model developed in Kelly, Pruitt and Su (2019) by providing more efficient Generalized Least Square (GLS) estimators with a closed-form limiting distribution allowing for a more consistent (mis)pricing inference. The IPCA model...

This paper develops a new estimation procedure for characteristic-based factor models of security returns. We treat the factor model as a weighted additive nonparametric regression model, with the factor returns serving as time-varying weights, and a set of univariate nonparametric functions...