The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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Testing the CAPM with Time‐Varying Risks and Returns

Published: 09/01/1991   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1991.tb04627.x

JAMES N. BODURTHA, NELSON C. MARK

This paper draws on Engle's autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic modeling strategy to formulate a conditional CAPM with time‐varying risk and expected returns. The model is estimated by generalized method of moments. A CAPM that allows mean excess returns to shift in January survives generalized method of moments specification tests for a number of omitted variables. However, a residual dividend yield component is found to remain in the excess returns of smaller firms. We find significant monthly and quarterly components in the risk premia and beta estimates.


Testing Volatility Restrictions on Intertemporal Marginal Rates of Substitution Implied by Euler Equations and Asset Returns

Published: 03/01/1994   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1994.tb04423.x

STEPHEN G. CECCHETTI, POK‐SANG LAM, NELSON C. MARK

The Euler equations derived from intertemporal asset pricing models, together with the unconditional moments of asset returns, imply a lower bound on the volatility of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. This paper develops and implements statistical tests of these lower bound restrictions. While the availability of short time series of consumption data often undermines the ability of these tests to discriminate among different utility functions, we find that the restrictions implied by a number of widely studied financial data sets continue to pose quite a challenge to the current generation of intertemporal asset pricing theories.