Risk adjusted performance measurement for a portfolio involves calculating the risk contribution of each single asset. We show that there is only one definition for the risk contributions which is suitable for performance measurement, namely as derivative of the underlying risk measure in direction of the considered asset weight. We also compute the derivatives for some popular risk measures in...

I construct a model of an asset market subject to search frictions, in an environment where both asset liquidity and market composition are determined endogenously. The analysis predicts that higher asset prices resulting from exogenously higher asset earnings imply: (i) a shorter search duration for sellers (higher liquidity), (ii) a shorter owner tenure before listing assets for resale (turno...

Many tests of asset-pricing models address only the pricing predictions, but these pricing predictions rest on portfolio choice predictions that seem obviously wrong. This paper suggests a new approach to asset pricing and portfolio choices based on unobserved heterogeneity. This approach yields the standard pricing conclusions of classical models but is consistent with very different portfolio...

2 Basic Theory 4 2.1 Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Arbitrage, State Prices, and Martingales . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.3 Individual Agent Optimality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.4 Habit and Recursive Utilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.5 Equilibrium and Pareto Optimality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.6 Equilibrium ...

This paper evaluates the specification errors of several empirical asset pricing models that have been developed as potential improvements on the CAPM. We use the methodology of Hansen and Jagannathan (J. Finance 51 (1997) 3), and the test assets are the 25 Fama-French (J. Financial Econom. 52 (1997) 557) equity portfolios sorted on size and book-to-market ratio, and the Treasury bill. We allow...

A significant problem in modern finance theory is how to price assets whose payoffs are outside the span of marketed assets. In practice, prices of assets are often assigned by using the Capital Asset Pricing Model. If the market portfolio is efficient, the price obtained this way is equal to the price of an asset whose payoff, viewed as a vector in a Hilbert space of random variables, is proje...

We find that past stock market variance forecasts excess stock market returns and that its predictive ability is greatly enhanced if the consumption-wealth ratio is also included in the forecasting equation. While the risk-return tradeoff is found negative if we use the latter as the instrumental variable for the conditional moments, the former suggests a positive one. We argue that the consump...

In this paper we derive the finite-sample distribution of the estimated weights of the tangency portfolio when both the population and the sample covariance matrices are singular. These results are used in the derivation of a statistical test on the weights of the tangency portfolio where the distribution of the test statistic is obtained under both the null and the alternative hypotheses. More...

We consider a simple CAPM with heterogenous expectations on assets’ mean returns and homogenous expectations on the covariance of returns. In this model alpha-opportunities naturally arise in a financial market equilibrium. We show that that the hunt for alpha-opportunities is a zero-sum game and that alpha-opportunities erode with the assets under management. Moreover, it is shown that a posit...

This paper explores the ability of theoretically-based asset pricing models such as the CAPM and the consumption CAPM referred to jointly as the (C)CAPM to explain the cross-section of average stock returns. Unlike many previous empirical tests of the (C)CAPM, we specify the pricing kernel as a conditional linear factor model, as would be expected if risk premia vary over time. Central to our a...