Cross-sectional asset pricing tests with GMM can generate spuriously high explanatory power for factor models when the moment conditions are specified such that they allow the estimated factor means to substantially deviate from the observed sample averages. In fact, by shifting the weights on...

In the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity, inference about the coefficients in a linear regression model these days is typically based on the ordinary least squares estimator in conjunction with using heteroskedasticity consistent standard errors. Similarly, even when the true form of...