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...

In this paper, we consider statistical inference for high-dimensional approximate factor models. We posit a weak factor structure, in which the factor loading matrix can be sparse and the signal eigenvalues may diverge more slowly than the cross-sectional dimension, N. We propose a novel...