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

We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher-order risk. We estimate our extended income process by GMM for household data from the United States. We find countercyclical...

We propose a semi-parametric approach to heterogeneous dynamic panel data modelling. The method generalizes existing approaches to model cross-section homogeneity within such panels. It allows for partial influence of other cross-section units on estimated coefficients, differentiating between...