Some extensions of the CAPM for individual assets

There is ample evidence that stock returns exhibit non-normal distributions with high skewness and excess kurtosis. Experimental evidence has shown that investors like positive skewness, dislike extreme losses and show high levels of prudence. This has motivated the introduction of the four-moment capital asset pricing model (CAPM). This extension, however, has not been able to successfully explain average returns. Our paper argues that a number of pitfalls may have contributed to the weak and conflicting empirical results found in the literature. We investigate whether conditional models, whether models that use individual stocks rather than portfolios and whether models that extend both the moment and factor dimension can improve on more traditional static, portfolio-based, mean–variance models. More importantly, we find that the use of a scaled coskewness measure in cross-section regression is likely to be spurious because of the possibility for the market skewness to be close to zero, at least for some periods. We provide a simple solution to this problem.