Asset Pricing Theories, Models, and Tests

An important but still partially unanswered question in the investment field is why different assets earn substantially different returns on average. Financial economists have typically addressed this question in the context of theoretically or empirically motivated asset pricing models. Since many of the proposed “risk” theories are plausible, a common practice in the literature is to take the models to the data and perform “horse races” among competing asset pricing specifications. A “good” asset pricing model should produce small pricing (expected return) errors on a set of test assets and should deliver reasonable estimates of the underlying market and economic risk premia. This chapter provides an up-to-date review of the statistical methods that are typically used to estimate, evaluate, and compare competing asset pricing models. The analysis also highlights several pitfalls in the current econometric practice and offers suggestions for improving empirical tests

The beginning of a great adventure: Bruno Pontecorvo in Rome and Paris

By resorting to primary sources, i.e. scientific literature of the time and archive documents, we reconstruct the period spent by Bruno Pontecorvo in Rome, starting from the graduation in November 1933 up to the departure to Paris in April 1936, and give also some details on the period spent in France until his departure for the United States in 1940. The archive documents come mainly from Churchill Archive Center (Cambridge), Chicago University Library (Chicago), Joliot-Curie Archives (Paris), College de France (Paris), Pr´efecture de Paris, Sapienza University Archives (Rome), and Domus Galilaeana Archives (Pisa)

History of physics research and physics education: The case of the first electron charge measurement

The historical case-study of Thomson’s discovery of electron (1897), of the first Thomson’s ion charge measurements (1897–1899) and of Millikan experiments of the elementary charge (1907–1911) is here discussed with the goal of stressing its possible physics education significance