This paper constructs portfolios of stocks with superior investment performance relative to a general market index. Portfolios are formed with different levels of sensitivity to cross-sectional return dispersion among all stocks in the market. We find that, for U.S stock returns in the period...

This paper provides cross-sectional tests of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). To mitigate problems with noise in realized stock return series, we use a smoothed data series of average daily returns per month. Tests using U.S. stock returns for equal-weighted portfolios indicate that beta...

Stock returns can have positive and negative sensitivity to the cross-sectional standard deviation of returns or return dispersion (RD). To capture asymmetric RD effects, we propose a new asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM that takes into account beta risk associated with the market factor and...

A growing list of proposed factors is causing factor and model selection problems in asset pricing research and practice. This paper mitigates these problems by combining the CRSP market index with multiple factors to create a single multifactor market index. Empirical tests of multifactor...