Essays On Conditional Asset Pricing And Machine Learning In Finance

In recent years there has been wide-scale access to improved statistical estimation techniques and the implementation of such techniques in financial economics. In this dissertation, I provide two brief overviews of the evolution of linear factor models in asset pricing and machine learning in finance. I then provide four research essays that implement machine learning in financial economic research settings. The first essay revisits tests of the conditional Capital Asset Pricing Model in an international context using multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity techniques. The second essay studies the use of hierarchical clustering in mean-variance optimal portfolio management. The third essay proposes a novel paragraph embedding technique that leverages the question-and-answer structure of earnings announcement calls to model the similarity between documents. The fourth and final essay studies the impact that dodgy managers have on idiosyncratic security performance.