Noisy prices and the Fama–French five-factor asset pricing model in China

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the five-factor model recently presented by Fama and French (2015a) that augments the traditional three-factor model with two new factors related to profitability and investment, taking into account the bias in mean returns induced by noise in prices. Using an extensive sample over the period 1997 to 2015, we find that the five-factor model consistently outperforms the three-factor model in the Chinese equity market. In contrast to the findings in Fama and French (2015a), both value and profitability factors are important, while the investment factor is found to be redundant for describing average returns in our sample. With respect to the double-sorted left-hand-side (LHS) portfolios, the main problem with the five-factor model is its failure to fully capture the high average returns of stocks whose returns perform like those of growth firms that invest conservatively due to low profitability. On the other hand, although we find mixed results in the three-dimensional sorting, the LHS portfolios with extremely low average returns are those that cause serious problems for the five-factor model.     

The cross-section of returns in frontier equity markets: Integrated or segmented pricing?

Is asset pricing segmented or integrated in frontier equity markets? To answer this question, we examine the returns on more than 4500 stocks from 22 frontier countries for the years 1997–2018. We evaluate the performance of a few major asset pricing models. We document strong value and momentum effects but find no consistent evidence regarding size, investment, and profitability premia. The recent six-factor model of Fama and French (2018) outperforms other models and best explains the cross-sectional and time-series variation in returns. Our results point to low integration of frontier equities, even after the global financial crisis. Local risk factors explain the behavior of prices much better than their global counterparts do. The low correlation of these risk factors allows augmenting the efficient frontier of an international investor.     

Size,value, profitability,and investment: Evidence from emerging markets

In this study, we investigate how the Fama and French three-, four-, and five-factor models perform in emerging markets. We find that the four- and five-factor models perform better than the three-factor model in most of our tests. We note that the value factor seems to be somewhat redundant in the presence of profitability and investment factors. We find clear evidence of size effects in average stock excess returns, little evidence of value and profitability effects, and some investment effects. Finally, the local factors perform better than the US and global factors do, showing evidence of emerging market segmentation.     

A Better Model? An Empirical Investigation of the Fama–French Five‐factor Model in Australia

Recently, Fama and French ( 2015a ) propose a five‐factor model by adding profitability and investment factors to their three‐factor model. This model outperforms the three‐factor model previously proposed by Fama and French ( 1993 ). Using an extensive sample over the 1982–2013 period, we investigate the performance of the five‐factor model in pricing Australian equities. We find that the five‐factor model is able to explain more asset pricing anomalies than a range of competing asset pricing models, which supports the superiority of the five‐factor model. We also find that despite the results documented by Fama and French ( 2015a ), the book‐to‐market factor retains its explanatory power in the presence of the investment and profitability factors. Our results are robust to alternative factor definitions and the formation of test assets. The study provides a strong out‐of‐sample test of the model, adding to the comparative evidence across international equity markets.     

Virtue Remains After Removing Sin: Finding Skill Amongst Socially Responsible Investment Managers

We examine the investment skill of socially responsible investment (SRI) fund managers. Prior studies use the ‘alpha’ from standard asset pricing models as a proxy for management skill. However, implicit in the use of such models is that managers operate under no investment constraints. In the SRI context, this is patently false and can lead to biased alpha estimates and false conclusions about the existence of skill. We introduce a novel three-factor Fama–French asset-pricing model with the aim of estimating alpha more accurately and hence investment skill, without bias. This model excludes SRI-prohibited industries such as defense, alcohol, tobacco and gambling in the construction of the Fama–French market, value and size risk factors. We show that the exclusion of the SRI-prohibited industries leads to subtle and complex changes to the risk factors that drive SRI returns. When we re-estimate alpha using the new model we find, in contrast to the conventional Fama–French model, evidence of statistically and economically significant alpha. Furthermore, the risk loadings on the new risk factors are similar to those of the original Fama–French model suggesting that changes in risk loadings are not responsible for the finding of significant skill.     

Does the Fama and French Five‐Factor Model Work Well in Japan?

In this study, we investigate whether the five‐factor model by Fama and French (2015) explains well the pricing structure of stocks with long‐run data for Japan. We conduct standard cross‐section asset pricing tests and examine the additional explanatory power of the new Fama and French factors; robust‐minus‐weak profitability factor and conservative‐minus‐aggressive investment factor. We find that robust‐minus‐weak and the conservative‐minus‐aggressive factors are not statistically significant when we conduct generalized method of moments (GMM) tests with the Hansen–Jagannathan distance measure. Thus, we conclude that the original version of the Fama and French five‐factor model is not the best benchmark pricing model for Japanese data during our sampling period from the year 1978 to the year 2014.     

Media Corruption: A Chinese Characteristic

The core goal of this study is to empirically investigate whether there is a “world price” of corporate sustainability. This is assessed in the context of standard asset pricing models—in particular, by asking whether a risk premium attaches to a sustainability factor after controlling for the Fama–French factors. Both time-series and cross-sectional tests are formulated and applied. The results show that (1) global Fama–French factors have strong power to explain global equity returns and (2) sustainability investments have no significant impact on global equity returns. The absence of a significant relationship between sustainability and returns implies that large institutional investors are free to implement sustainability mandates without fear of breaching their fiduciary duties from realising negative returns due to incorporating a sustainability investment process.     

A risk-based explanation of return patterns—Evidence from the Polish stock market

Using both sorting and cross-sectional tests, this paper investigates the patterns in the average stock returns related to stock fundamentals, past return performance, idiosyncratic risk, and turnover in the Polish equity market for the period 2002–2011. To examine the persistence of the patterns, we apply the Monotonic Relation test of Patton and Timmermann (2010). The results favour the book-to-market ratio as a determinant of the cross-sectional variation of stock returns while momentum remains insignificant. The Fama and French (1993) three-factor model, which uses local size and value risk premiums adjusted for the skewed size distribution of the sample, captures most of the recognised anomalies. Further, we show that Polish domestic SMB and HML factors are not correlated with their U.S. and German counterparts.     

Digesting anomalies in emerging European markets: A comparison of factor pricing models

This study compares the performance of four popular factor pricing models—the capital asset-pricing model (Sharpe, 1964), the three-factor model of Fama and French (1993), the four-factor model of Carhart (1997), and the five-factor model of Fama and French (2015a)—testing their explanatory power over a broad range of cross-sectional return patterns in emerging European markets. We identify, classify, and replicate 100 anomalies documented in the financial literature. Only 20 (32) of the capitalization-weighted (equal-weighted) anomaly portfolios are significantly profitable. We show that the five-factor model best explains the returns of anomaly portfolios and verify its superiority over the other models.     

The cross-section of emerging market stock returns

Using monthly stock returns from 28 emerging market countries and a total sample period of 21 years, we investigate the predictive power of a broad set of factors. We document that the factor definitions of the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model are less robust compared to alternative factor definitions. In contrast, the anomalous returns associated with cash flow-to-price, gross profitability, composite equity issuance, and momentum are pervasive as they show up in equal- and value-weighted portfolio sorts as well as in cross-sectional regressions. In contrast to financial theory and in line with previous findings, we do not find a positive cross-sectional relationship between risk and return. Finally, return forecasts derived from the alternative factor definitions are superior in their out-of-sample predictive ability to the ones derived from the five-factor model.     

Common risk factors in returns in Asian emerging stock markets

This paper examines the application of the Fama and French's (1993) three-factor model in three Asian emerging markets (Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan). The empirical evidence is consistent with the US findings that the model can explain most of the variations in average returns. However, we find that the main contributing factor is the contemporaneous market excess returns. The impact of the size effect and book-to-market (BE/ME) factor is limited and in some cases insignificant. When the three-factor model is modified by using lagged market excess returns instead in order to check for the predictability of the market factor, the explanatory power of the model drops substantially but both the risk factors for size and BE/ME are now able to contribute significantly in explaining the cross-sectional variations of stock returns. Their explanatory powers are strongest for small-size with high BE/ME portfolios. The robustness of our results is also checked for the separation of up and down markets periods and January effect.     

Unveiling Contemporaneous Relations Between Jump Risk and Cross Section of Stock Returns

This study analyzes the impact of time varying jump risk on aggregate returns. We, in particular, examine the pricing of jump size and intensity components in the cross section of stock returns for four Asian markets. We use stochastic volatility model with jumps to estimate jump size and intensity. Fama–MacBeth regression results indicate that both jump size and intensity have statistically significant effect on expected returns. A one standard deviation increase in jump intensity beta lowers the expected annual returns by 1% for Japan, 2% for China, 5% for India, and 7% for South Korea. The results are consistent even after controlling for the Fama and French three factors, firm size, and liquidity proxies.     

Estimating the Cost‐of‐Equity Capital Using Empirical Asset Pricing Models

Empirical asset pricing models seek to capture characteristic‐based patterns in the cross‐section of average stock returns. I propose a new approach for constructing these models, and investigate its performance with respect to estimating the cost‐of‐equity capital. Using a model that accounts for the cross‐sectional relation between five characteristics and average stock returns, I obtain cost‐of‐equity estimates that outperform those produced by the Fama‐French five‐factor model in out‐of‐sample tests. Because the proposed approach builds directly on standard cross‐sectional regression techniques, it provides complete flexibility in choosing the firm characteristics used to formulate the cost‐of‐equity estimates.     

Explaining Anomalies in Australia with a Five‐factor Asset Pricing Model

This paper compares the ability of three‐factor and five‐factor asset pricing models to explain the apparent profitability of a broad selection of anomalies in Australian equity returns. Rather than examining the fit of each model to common test portfolios, our focus is on the spread return to long–short trading strategies designed around so‐called anomalies. After documenting significant spread returns to 16 anomalies (including several not previously studied in Australia), the empirical analysis provides cautious support that the recently‐proposed investment and profitability factors have a role to play. The number of anomalies that remains after risk adjustment decreases under the five‐factor model. Further, while the magnitude of reduction in alpha is modest, our testing shows that it is statistically significant in many cases. However, both three‐factor and five‐factor models repeatedly fail the Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken's (1989) (GRS) test, suggesting that the quest for a better asset pricing model is not yet complete.     

A股市场新股的因素定价模型实证研究

现代股权定价理论对A股初始定价时存在缺陷,采用主成份回归法,确定影响A股初始定价的主因子,在此基础上建立初始定价模型。根据模型,影响A股初始定价的因素从高到低分别为:成本因子、投资偏好因子、市况因子、业绩成长性因子,实证结果与传统股票定价理论并不吻合。     

The price of freedom: A Fama–French freedom factor

Economic institutions in-part explain cross-country variation in levels of investment and capital market characteristics. Here, country-level equity returns are related to cross-country differences in economic institutions as measured by an index of economic freedom. The ex-ante level and ex-post change in economic freedom are observed to be country-level equity return factors exhibiting Sharpe ratios greater than that of the value, momentum, and size factors, factors to which change in economic freedom has a low correlation. Fama–MacBeth regressions confirm the economic freedom factor. Finally, the excess return earned from investing in countries with low economic freedom is the price of freedom.     

An examination of predictable risk and return in UK stock returns

This paper examines whether conditional asset pricing models can explain the predictability in UK stock returns using the frameworks of Ferson and Harvey (1999) and Kirby (1998). The paper finds that the domestic Arbitrage Pricing Theory model is able to explain most of the observed time-series predictability in stock returns and tends to perform better than the domestic CAPM in explaining the predictability generated by the predictive instruments. The paper also finds that domestic asset pricing models tends to capture more of the time-series predictability in UK stock returns than international models. However none of the models are able to explain all of the predictability in returns.     

The Investment Performance of Socially Responsible Investment Funds in Australia

Interest in the notion of the possible financial sacrifice suffered by socially responsible investment (SRI) fund investors for considering ethical, social and environmental issues in their investment decisions has spawned considerable academic interest in the performance of SRI funds. Both the Australian and international research literature have yielded largely mixed results. However, several of these studies are hampered by methodological problems which can obscure the significance of reported results, such as the use of small sample sizes, inconsistencies in the time frames selected to analyse performance and different modelling frameworks used to estimate investment returns. This study attempts to redress some of these issues by investigating the returns performance of 89 ethical funds in Australia over the period 1986–2005. Using a multi-factor CAPM model [Fama, E. F., and K. R. French (1996) J. Finance 51(1), 55] (which controls for factors such as size, book-to-market value and momentum) we find that ethical funds significantly under-perform the market in Australia, particularly in the most recent 5 years of our sample period (2000–2005). Risk adjusted returns (using Jensen’s alpha) indicate that average annual underperformance is around 1.52% in the 2000–2005 period for our sample and .88% over the whole sample period. Our results contrast with many previous studies (both Australian and international), which have not found statistically significant differences in the performance of ethical funds relative to market benchmarks and/or a matched sample of conventional funds. Stewart Jones is a Professor of Accounting with the University of Sydney, appointed in 2001. His research interests embrace credit risk modelling, capital markets research, standard setting and accounting theory. Sandra van der Laan is a lecturer in the Discipline of Accounting at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on accounting as a social discourse and accounting as a mechanism to discharge a broad range of corporate accountabilities. Geoff Frost is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the University of Sydney. His research interests include corporate social responsibility and ethical investment. Janice Loftus is a senior lecturer in accounting at the University of Sydney. Her current research interests include financial accounting and corporate social responsibility reporting.