Portfolio Theory has during many decades been considered as the holy grail of investment despite the fact that very few empirical studies in the public domain have shown that portfolio theory outperforms a random equal weighted portfolio. We will in this paper empirically investigate how...

Stock market variance-return or price relations are sometimes negative and sometimes positive. We explain these puzzling findings using a model with two ("bad" and "good") variances. In the model, conditional equity premium depends positively on bad variance and negatively on good variance....

We develop a new approach to identify model misspecifications based on Minimum Discrepancy (MD) projections that correct asset pricing models with the use of nonlinear functions of basis assets returns. These nonlinear corrections make our method more effective than the Hansen and Jagannathan...

When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...

This paper presents an innovative approach to extracting factors which are shown to predict the VIX, the S&P 500 Realized Volatility and the Variance Risk Premium. The approach is innovative along two different dimensions, namely: (1) we extract factors from panels of filtered volatilities - in...

In this paper we approximate the risk factors of a polynomial arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model by running a sequential set of linear regressions independent across time. This approximation avoids the cost of a full optimization procedure allowing for a simple method to extract the...

We develop a new approach to evaluate asset pricing models (APMs) based on Minimum Discrepancy (MD) projections that generalize the Hansen-Jagannathan (HJ, 1997) distance to account for an arbitrary number of moments of asset returns. The Minimum Discrepancy projections correct APMs to become...

This paper generalizes the Bollerslev and Zhang (2003) approach for the estimation of loadings of asset pricing models using "realized" measures and co-measures of risk. We propose here to extend this approach by including higher-moments in asset pricing models. Estimations are conducted using...

This paper demonstrates how both quantitative and qualitative results of general, analytically tractable asset-pricing model in which heterogeneous agents behave consistently with a constant relative risk aversion assumption can be applied to the particular case of linear investment choices. In...