The size premium as a lottery

Richard J. McGee and Jose Olmo

The European Journal of Finance, 2021, vol. 27, issue 1-2, 158-177

Abstract: We investigate empirically the dependence of the size effect on the top performing stocks in a cross-section of risky assets separated by industry. We propose a test for a lottery-style factor payoff based on a stochastic utility model for an under-diversified investor. The associated conditional logit model is used to rank different investment portfolios based on size and we assess the robustness of the ranking to the inclusion/exclusion of the best performing stocks in the cross-section. Our results show that the size premium has a lottery-style payoff and is spurious for most industries once we remove the single best returning stock in an industry from the sample each month. Analysis in an asset pricing framework shows that standard asset pricing models fail to correctly specify the size premium on risky assets when industry winners are excluded from the construction of the size factor. Our findings have implications for stock picking, investment management and risk factor analysis.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1351847X.2019.1644360 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eurjfi:v:27:y:2021:i:1-2:p:158-177

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJF20

DOI: 10.1080/1351847X.2019.1644360

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Finance is currently edited by Chris Adcock

More articles in The European Journal of Finance from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().