Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

Beta-sorted portfolios - portfolios comprised of assets with similar covariation to selected risk factors - are a popular tool in empirical finance to analyze models of (conditional) expected returns. Despite their widespread use, little is known of their statistical properties in contrast to...