In this paper, we discuss the impact of different formulations of asset pricing models on the outcome of specification tests that are performed using excess returns. We point out that the popular way of specifying the stochastic discount factor (SDF) as a linear function of the factors is...

The risk premia assigned to economic (non-traded) risk factors can be decomposed into three parts: i) the risk premia on maximum-correlation portfolios mimicking the factors; ii) (minus) the covariance between the non-traded components of the candidate pricing kernel of a given model and the...

This paper considers two alternative formulations of the linear factor model (LFM) with nontraded factors. The first formulation is the traditional LFM, where the estimation of risk premia and alphas is performed by means of a cross-sectional regression of average returns on betas. The second...