Empirical Evaluation of Asset Pricing Models: Arbitrage and Pricing Errors in Contingent Claims

Abstract

Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) have developed two measures of pricing errors for asset-pricing models: the maximum pricing error in all static portfolios of the test assets and the maximum pricing error in all contingent claims of the assets. In this paper, we develop simulation-based Bayesian inference for these measures. While the literature reports that the time-varying extensions substantially reduce pricing errors of classic models on the standard test assets, our analysis shows that the reduction is much smaller based on the second measure. Those time-varying models have large pricing errors on the contingent claims of the test assets because their stochastic dis- count factors are often negative and admit arbitrage opportunities.

Keywords: asset pricing, arbitrage, contingent claims

JEL Classification: G1, G12