Researchers and practitioners employ a variety of time-series processes to forecast betas, using either short-memory models or implicitly imposing infinite memory. We find that both approaches are inadequate: beta factors show consistent long-memory properties. For the vast majority of stocks,...

We investigate the impact of product market competition on firms' systematic risk. Using a measure of total product market similarity, we document a strong negative link between market power and market betas. There is a more than threefold increase in the effect during the most recent...

We investigate the impact of product market competition on firms’ systematic risk. Using a measure of total product market similarity, we document a strong negative link between market power and market betas. There is a more than threefold increase in the effect during the most recent...

Researchers and practitioners face many choices when estimating an asset's sensitivities toward risk factors, i.e., betas. We study the effect of different data sampling frequencies, forecast adjustments, and model combinations for beta estimation. Using the entire U.S. stock universe and a...

We study the term structure of variance (total risk), systematic and idiosyncratic risk. Consistent with the expectations hypothesis, we find that, for the entire market, the slope of the term structure of variance is mainly informative about the path of future variance. Thus, there is little...

Researchers and practitioners face many choices when estimating an asset's sensitivities toward risk factors, i.e., betas. Using the entire U.S. stock universe and a sample period of more than 50 years, we find that a historical estimator based on daily return data with an exponential weighting...

We confront prominent asset pricing models with the classical out-of-sample cross-sectional test of Fama and MacBeth (1973). For all models, we uncover three main findings: (i) the intercept coefficients are economically large and highly statistically significant; (ii) the cross-sectional factor...