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Journal of Finance Vol. 53 No. 4 1998

An Asymptotic Theory for Estimating Beta‐Pricing Models Using Cross‐Sectional Regression

Ravi Jagannathan1; Zhenyu Wang2

1 Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University Carlson School of Management University of Minnesota · 2 Graduate School of Business, Columbia University

Abstract

Without the assumption of conditional homoskedasticity, a general asymptotic distribution theory for the two‐stage cross‐sectional regression method shows that the standard errors produced by the Fama–MacBeth procedure do not necessarily overstate the precision of the risk premium estimates. When factors are misspecified, estimators for risk premiums can be biased, and the t ‐value of a premium may converge to infinity in probability even when the true premium is zero. However, when a beta‐pricing model is misspecified, the t ‐values for firm characteristics generally converge to infinity in probability, which supports the use of firm characteristics in cross‐sectional regressions for detecting model misspecification.

DOI
10.1111/0022-1082.00053
Volume
53
Issue
4
Pages
1285-1309
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref

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