Too Good to Be True? Fallacies in Evaluating Risk Factor Models

Nikolay Gospodinov, Raymond Kan and Cesare Robotti ()

No 2017-9, FRB Atlanta Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Abstract: This paper is concerned with statistical inference and model evaluation in possibly misspecified and unidentified linear asset-pricing models estimated by maximum likelihood and one-step generalized method of moments. Strikingly, when spurious factors (that is, factors that are uncorrelated with the returns on the test assets) are present, the models exhibit perfect fit, as measured by the squared correlation between the model's fitted expected returns and the average realized returns. Furthermore, factors that are spurious are selected with high probability, while factors that are useful are driven out of the model. Although ignoring potential misspecification and lack of identification can be very problematic for models with macroeconomic factors, empirical specifications with traded factors (e.g., Fama and French, 1993, and Hou, Xue, and Zhang, 2015) do not suffer of the identification problems documented in this study.

Keywords: asset pricing; spurious risk factors; unidentified models; model misspecification; continuously updated GMM; maximum likelihood; goodness-of-fit; rank test (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C13 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2017-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/resea ... odels-2017-11-16.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Too good to be true? Fallacies in evaluating risk factor models (2019)
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:fip:fedawp:2017-09

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FRB Atlanta Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rob Sarwark ().