Cross-sectional asset pricing tests with GMM can generate spuriouslyhigh explanatory power for factor models when the moment conditions are specifiedsuch that they allow the estimated factor means to substantially deviate from theobserved sample averages. In fact, by shifting the weights on the...

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...

We develop a penalized two-pass regression with time-varying factor loadings. The penalization in the first pass enforces sparsity for the time-variation drivers while also maintaining compatibility with the no arbitrage restrictions by regularizing appropriate groups of coefficients. The second...

The accuracy of variance prediction depends on both the specification and the accuracy of parameter estimation. To predict stock return variance in a large and ever-changing universe, this paper proposes to replace the classic time-series dynamics specification per each name with a...

We study how the distribution of stock returns is influenced through investor opinion by applying expectile regression to abnormal NASDAQ returns over the period April 2015 - August 2019. Thereby, we differentiate between different aspects of investor opinion: investor perception, attention and...

We extract contextualized representations of news text to predict returns using the state-of-the-art large language models in natural language processing. Unlike the traditional bag-of-words approach, the contextualized representation captures both the syntax and semantics of text, thus...