This paper develops a simple technique that controls for "false discoveries", or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated alphas. We...

We develop an econometric methodology to infer the path of risk premia from large unbalanced panel of individual stock returns. We estimate the time-varying risk premia implied by conditional linear asset pricing models where the conditioning includes instruments common to all assets and asset...

Testing procedures for predictive regressions with lagged autoregressive variables imply a suboptimal inference in presence of small violations of ideal assumptions. We propose a novel testing framework resistant to such violations, which is consistent with nearly integrated regressors and...

We build a simple diagnostic criterion for approximate factor structure in large panel datasets. Given observable factors, the criterion checks whether the errors are weakly cross-sectionally correlated or share at least one unobservable common factor (interactive effects). A general version...

We derive nonparametric tests of symmetry using asymmetric kernels with either shrinking or fixed bandwidths. We show how to extend the approach to examine conditional symmetry by deriving conditions under which our tests are applicable to residuals from semiparametric models with a...

This paper introduces a new numerical option pricing method by fast recursive projections. The projection step consists in representing the payoff and the state price density with a fast discrete transform based on a simple grid sampling. The recursive step consists in transmitting coefficients...