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...

We comprehensively investigate the robustness of well-known factor models to altered factor-formation breakpoints. Deviating from the standard 30th and 70th percentile selection, we use an extensive set of anomaly test portfolios to uncover two main findings: First, there is a trade-off between...

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...

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...

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,...