The concept of common factors has in the econometrics literature been applied to conditional means or in some cases to conditional variances. In this paper we generalize this concept to bivariate distributions. This is done using the conditional bivariate copula as the statistical tool. The...

Recent studies in the empirical finance literature have reported evidence of two types of asymmetries in the joint distribution of stock returns. The first is skewness in the distribution of individual stock returns. The second is an asymmetry in the dependence between stocks: stock returns...

We consider the problem of estimating parametric multivariate density models when unequal amounts of data are available on each variable. We focus in particular on the case that the unknown parameter vector may be partitioned into elements relating only to a marginal distribution and elements...

Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted on the assumption of mean squared error loss under which forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with increasing variance as the forecast...

Evidence that asset returns are more highly correlated during volatile markets and during market downturns (see Longin and Solnik, 2001, and Ang and Chen, 2002) has lead some researchers to propose alternative models of dependence. In this paper we develop two simple goodness-of-fit tests for...

One can consider the concept of market neutrality for hedge funds as having breadth and depth: breadth reflects the number of market risks to which a fund is neutral, while depth reflects the completeness of the neutrality of the fund to market risks. We focus on market neutrality depth, and...

This article considers the estimation of the parameters of a copula via a simulated method of moments (MM) type approach. This approach is attractive when the likelihood of the copula model is not known in closed form, or when the researcher has a set of dependence measures or other functionals...

Forecast rationality under squared error loss implies various bounds on second moments of the data across forecast horizons. For example, the mean squared forecast error should be increasing in the horizon, and the mean squared forecast should be decreasing in the horizon. We propose rationality...

We investigate whether stock betas vary with the release of firm-specific news. Using daily firm-level betas estimated from intraday prices, we find that betas increase on earnings announcement days and revert to their average levels two to five days later. The increase in betas is greater for...