Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Essays On Asset Pricing: A Model Comparison Perspective, Lingxiao Zhao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical and empirical asset pricing from a Bayesian model comparison perspective. In the first Chapter, revisiting the framework of Barillas and Shanken (2018), BS henceforth, we show that the Bayesian marginal likelihood-based model comparison method in that paper is unsound: the priors on the nuisance parameters across models must satisfy a change of variable property for densities that is violated by the Jeffreys priors used in the BS method. Extensive simulation exercises confirm that the BS method performs unsatisfactorily. We derive a new class of improper priors on the nuisance parameters, starting from a …