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...

This paper develops alternative asymptotic results for a large class of two-step semiparametric estimators. The first main result is an asymptotic distribution result for such estimators and differs from those obtained in earlier work on classes of semiparametric two-step estimators by...

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 econometric properties in contrast to...

Non-standard distributional approximations have received considerable attention in recent years. They often provide more accurate approximations in small samples, and theoretical improvements in some cases. This paper shows that the seemingly unrelated "?many instruments asymptotics" ?and...

Binned scatter plots are a powerful statistical tool for empirical work in the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Available methods rely on a quantile-based partitioning estimator of the conditional mean regression function to primarily construct flexible yet interpretable...

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies. Despite its popularity, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure. We develop a general framework for portfolio sorting by casting...

Binscatter is very popular in applied microeconomics. It provides a flexible, yet parsimonious way of visualizing and summarizing “big data” in regression settings, and it is often used for informal testing of substantive hypotheses such as linearity or monotonicity of the regression...