NBER Publications by Andrew Siegel

We develop asset pricing models' implications for portfolio efficiency when there is conditioning information in the form of a set of lagged instruments. A model of expected returns identifies a portfolio that should be minimum variance efficient with respect to the conditioning information. Our tests refine previous tests of portfolio efficiency, using the conditioning information optimally. We reject the efficiency of all static or time-varying combinations of the three Fama-French (1996) factors with respect to the conditioning information and also the conditional efficiency of time-varying combinations of the factors, given standard lagged instruments.

Hansen and Jagannathan (HJ, 1991) describe restrictions on the volatility of stochastic discount factors (SDFs) that price a given set of asset returns. This paper compares the sampling properties of different versions of HJ bounds that use conditioning information in the form of a given set of lagged instruments. HJ describe one way to use conditioning information. Their approach is to multiply the original returns by the lagged variables, and much of the asset pricing literature to date has followed this ihmultiplicativel. approach. We also study two versions of optimized HJ bounds with conditioning information. One is from Gallant, Hansen and Tauchen (1990) and the second is based on the unconditionally-efficient portfolios derived in Ferson and Siegel (2000). We document finite-sample ...