This paper demonstrates that the factors based on typical procedures that employ sorting by characteristics (including size and book-to-market, among others) can create a good mechanical fit in the regressions of portfolio returns. Such factors are approximately linear functions of the sorted...

This paper deals with the estimation of the risk–return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk–return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk–return relation....

We use pre-World War I Brussels Stock Exchange (BSE) data to investigate the relation between average stock returns and market beta, size, momentum, dividend yield and total risk on the cross-section of stock returns. Based on portfolio sorts and Fama–MacBeth regressions, we find no...

Consider a financial market with N risk-averse asymmetrically informed traders. When N grows at the same rate as noise trading, prices in competitive and in strategic rational expectations equilibrium converge to each other at a rate of 1/N. Equilibria in the two scenarios are close when noise...

Idiosyncratic risk has been the subject of a great deal of international financial research. However, one question remains unsolved thus far: how to introduce it in asset pricing models. The aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we propose and compare two alternative implications of...

This paper derives closed-form expressions for consumption-based stochastic discount factors adjusted by market-wide illiquidity shocks, considering both contemporaneous and ultimate consumption risk. We find that market-wide illiquidity risk is important for pricing risky assets under...

We use a unique, non-public dataset of trader positions in 17 U.S. commodity futures markets to provide novel evidence on those markets' financialization in the past decade. We then show that the correlation between the rates of return on investible commodity and equity indices rises amid...

The Dow Jones Islamic Market indices (DJIMI) are constructed by screening out stocks that are incompatible with Islam's prohibition of interest and certain lines of business. However, as a blunt instrument, the interest rate can affect discounted cash flows of any firm, even a firm with no...

We provide a new framework for estimating the systematic and idiosyncratic jump tail risks in financial asset prices. Our estimates are based on in-fill asymptotics for directly identifying the jumps, together with Extreme Value Theory (EVT) approximations and methods-of-moments for assessing...

This paper explores commonality in liquidity for country ETFs. Using data from 21 country ETFs, the empirical results present the strong commonality in liquidity among country ETFs. Furthermore, the paper shows that the magnitude of commonality in liquidity for country ETFs varies with the...