The past several years have witnessed the introduction of hundreds of so-called “smart beta” equity indices. These indices provide exposure to risk factors, such as value or low volatility, in order to seek excess return and/or risk reduction compared to cap-weighted indices. Although the...

We discuss the finding that cross-sectional characteristic based models have yielded portfolios with higher excess monthly returns but lower risk than their arbitrage pricing theory counterparts in an analysis of equity returns of stocks listed on the JSE. Under the assumption of general...

We develop a model in which investors have heterogeneous beliefs about both the mean and the risk of future signals and the final stock payoff. As investors who perceive the lowest risk vary across different periods, the overall perception of the market risk is reduced in an economy with dynamic...

The term “equity premium puzzle” was coined in 1985 by economists Rajnish Mehra and Edward C. Prescott. The equity premium puzzle in considered one of the most significant questions in finance. A number of papers have explored the fundamental questions of why the premium exists and has not...

The CAPM is commonly used for an introduction of the equity cost in practice to calculate the corporate value, which is composed by the risk-free rate, equity market return and each respective beta. However, there is a fundamental complication between the risk, cost and return for the equity...

Many studies have found that portfolios of low beta stocks have higher growth rates than portfolios of high beta stocks and have concluded that low beta stocks have higher growth rates than high beta stocks. Since rational investor behavior is thought to imply that additional risk is rewarded...

Using survey forecasts, we find that systematic errors in expectations of long-term inflation and short-term nominal earnings growth are the main driver of prices and return puzzles for bonds and stocks. We demonstrate this by deriving and testing a single necessary and sufficient condition...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

This paper builds a theoretical framework to endogeneize the editorial decisions of media and analyze their asset pricing implications. The media outlet optimally reports man-bites-dog signals by choosing to report about the firm that generates more uncertainty to investors. There are three main...

CAPM has come a long way, has passed the time-test, and is fast coming out as a winner despite the onslaught of both, APT and multi-factor CAPM. The bottom line is that CAPM is needed, dead or alive. If so, it does not mean that CAPM stays as, “CAPM." Downside risk in recent times has caught...