We derive a nonparametric test for constant (continuous) beta over a fixed interval of time. Continuous beta is defined as the ratio of the continuous covariation between an asset and observable risk factor (e.g., the market return) and the continuous variation of the latter. Our test is based...

We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

We propose a nonparametric method to test which characteristics provide independent information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...

We propose a linearization of rule-based algorithms that reveals the most important interactions between characteristics and macroeconomic variables when explaining future stock returns. Our results suggest that the two types of predictors are intertwined, which implies that the relationships...

This paper offers a general and comprehensive definition of the day-of-the-week effect. Using symbolic dynamics, we develop a unique test based on ordinal patterns in order to detect it. This test uncovers the fact that the so-called “day-of-the-week” effect is partly an artifact of the...

The volatility implied by observed market prices as a function of the strike and time to maturity form an Implied Volatility Surface (IVS). Practical applications require reducing the dimension and characterize its dynamics through a small number of factors. Such dimension reduction is...

The paper outlines and tests, by means of Monte-Carlo simulations, a simple strategy of using existing non-parametric tests for jumps at the daily frequency to identify jumps at higher sampling frequencies. The suggested strategy allow for identification of the number of jumps and jump times...

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...

Missing data for return predictors is a common problem in cross sectional asset pricing studies. Most papers do not explicitly discuss how they treat missing data but conventional treatments focus on complete cases for all predictors or impute the unconditional mean for the missing predictor....