Year: 2009
Type: report
Abstract: The heavy-tailed distribution of firm sizes first discovered by Zipf (1949) is one of the best established empirical facts in economics.We show that it has strong implications for asset pricing.Due to the concentration of the market portfolio when the distribution of the capitalization of firms is sufficiently heavy-tailed, an additional risk factor generically appears even for very large economies.Our two-factor model is as successful empirically as the three-factor Fama-French model.
DOI: 10.3386/w15295
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1489059209