The construction of the original HML portfolio (Fama and French, 1993) includes six seemingly innocuous decisions that could easily have been replaced with alternatives that are just as reasonable. I propose such alternatives and construct HML portfolios. In sample, the average estimate of the...

A generalization of the hyperbolic secant distribution which allows both for skewness and for leptokurtosis was given by Morris (1982). Recently, Vaughan (2002) proposed another flexible generalization of the hyperbolic secant distribution which has a lot of nice properties but is not able to...

This paper conducts a comprehensive asset pricing study based on a unique dataset for the German stock market. For the period 1963 to 2006 we show that two value characteristics (book-to-market equity, earnings-to-price) and momentum explain the cross-section of stock returns. Corresponding...

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of recently proposed asset pricing models which extend the standard preference specification by a reference level of consumption. We motivate an alternative model that accounts for the return on human capital as a determinant of the reference level....