The Asset pricing literature has produced hundreds of risk factor candidates aimed at explaining the cross-section of expected excess returns, although risk factors which are in fact capable of providing independent information remains an open question. Appling a sparse model, Kozak, Nagel, and...

It is well known that Markowitz Portfolio Optimization often leads to unreasonable and unbalanced portfolios that are optimal in-sample but perform very poorly out-of-sample. There is a strong relationship between these poor returns and the fact that covariance matrices that are used within the...

USA market is the benchmark for empirical finance and considered the closest example of how an efficient market should behave. On the other hand, divergent results from the observed in the USA are often associated with unreliable and due deviations from efficient hypothesis. However, how would...