This dissertation consists of three essays on empirical asset pricing. In the first paper, we examine the impact of test criteria in identifying true asset pricing factors. We focus on the Sharpe ratio and pricing performance improvement. While both criteria are exposed to model...

Asset Pricing, Default Risk. - The central question of this thesis is whether firm distress risk explains stock returns. This question is important because it has been suspected that distress risk might reconcile a growing evidence on patterns in returns, which are otherwise hard to explain,...