Studies consistently find that inflation is an important augmented factor for intertemporal capital asset pricing models (ICAPMs) when pricing the Fama–French 25 size and book-to-market portfolios. We extend this line of research by investigating two alternative ICAPM models (from Michel; Hahn and Lee) and the three-factor model from Hou et al. We find significant evidence that both ICAPMs and Hou et al.’s three-factor model perform better when augmented with inflation than the original models. The augmented models achieve a good model fit with the fewest factors, thus avoiding or alleviating the over-fitting problem.

In a pioneering effort, we re-evaluate the performance of (C)CAPM (joint CAPM and consumption CAPM) in digesting a large number of anomalies. Our key contribution illustrates that the performance of (C)CAPM appears to be quite sensitive to the choice of weighting matrix. OLS cross-sectional regression reveals the poor performance of (C)CAPM. In contrast, the CAPM model actually explains a large portion of anomalies quite well when using an efficient weighting matrix (GLS), indicating that the prior expectation that the CAPM exhibits poor empirical performance should fundamentally be reversed.