We study the performance of conditional asset pricing models in explaining the German cross-section of stock returns. Our test assets are portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market as in the paper by Fama and French (1993). Our results show that the empirical performance of the Capital Asset...

According to the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model, expected rates of return on individual stocks differ only because of their different levels of non-diversifiable risk (beta). However, Fama/French (1992) show that the two variables size and book-to-market ratio capture the...

Existing time series of the returns on German stocks are either short or have weaknesses. We discuss the problems of creating such a time series and then report our monthly series based on all stocks in the top segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. We compare our return series with the...