We extend and test two models of asset pricing that feature status-seeking through accumulation of not only financial and real assets but also human capital. We use weak-identification robust tests to confront these models with U.S. aggregate data. Contrary to previous results, we find that the...

We embed Max Weber (1958)'s spirit of capitalism (SOC) into an otherwise standard Lucas' tree asset pricing model, by assuming that economic agents care about their social status and that the latter is related to financial wealth. We show that, absent uncertainty, for a wide range of values for...

Rare disasters become increasingly important for understanding asset pricing, and the spirit of capitalism has been successful in explaining various issues in economic growth, savings behavior, and asset pricing. However, pervious studies don't reveal the connection of these two ideas. This...

We explore the empirical usefulness of conditional coskewness to explain the cross-section of equity returns. We find that coskewness is an important determinant of the returns to equity, and that the pricing relationship varies through time. In particular we find that when the conditional...

We build a new asset pricing framework to study the effects of aggregate illiquidity on asset prices, volatilities and correlations. In our framework the Black-Scholes economy is obtained as the limiting case of perfectly liquid markets. The model is consistent with empirical studies on the...

A test of the CAPM is developed conditional on a prior belief about the correlation between the true market return and the proxy return used in the test. Consideration is given to the effect of the proxy's mismeasurement of the market return on the estimation of the market model. Failure to...