Since Roll (The Journal of Finance 47(1):3-41, 1992) and Heston and Rouwenhorst (Journal of Financial Economics 36:3-27, 1994), there has been a debate whether country factors in international stock returns are typically more variable than sector factors. The addition of emerging markets (EMs)...

Using an international Thomson Reuters Datastream database, where size coverage is unusually wide and data errors have been reduced to a low level, we show that some specification decisions, and especially those related to size, may have a significant impact on asset-pricing test results. We...