Macroeconomic factors in Chilean work performances

This paper follows the macroeconomic variables tradition of the APT of Ross (1976a), which has the advantage (in comparison with the Factor Analysis approach) of allowing an economic interpretation of both the common factors and the risk premia. Similar to Burmeister and McElroy (1988), we consider four measured macroeconomic factors, and one unobserved factor. The existence of unobserved factors is a generalization of the previous work by Chen, Roll and Ross (1986). We test the restrictions that the APT imposes on a general factor model in the period 1990-2003. In addition, the CAPM is nested in the APT, which allows us to test the CAPM. Our empirical results are: (a) the APT restriction is not rejected by the data, (b) the innovations in the rate of growth of the Imacec (a monthly indicator of general economic growth), of the price of copper, and of the price of oil, are priced factors in the sample, while the innovation in inflation rates does not have a statistically significant premium in the sample, and (c) the CAPM is strongly rejected by the data, in favor of the APT.