Risk and return: CAPM and CCAPM

Can consumption growth risk (or consumption beta) serve a better measure of risk than market beta? This paper answers this question by testing and comparing the performance of the traditional Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and consumption-based CAPM (CCAPM) across seven financial market sub-sectors in the emerging Taiwan stock market. The empirical performance of the CAPM is encouraging. The relationship between stock returns and beta is statistically significant and the coefficient of determination of the regression is high across all of seven industry sub-sectors. In comparison, the CCAPM fails to explain the Taiwan stock market although the consumption beta should offer a better measure of systematic risk theoretically. © 2002 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. JEL classification: G120