The characteristics book-to-market equity ratio, size and momentum are highly correlated with the average returns of common stocks. Fama and French (J Financ Econ 33(1):3-56, 1993), (J Finance 50(1):131-155, 1995) and (J Finance 51(1):55-84, 1996) argue (for size and the book-to-market equity...

Using high-frequency data, we decompose the time-varying beta for stocks into beta for continuous systematic risk and beta for discontinuous systematic risk. Estimated discontinuous betas for S&P500 constituents between 2003 and 2011 generally exceed the corresponding continuous betas. We...

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...