The cost of capital of the financial sector

Tobias Adrian, Evan Friedman and Tyler Muir

No 755, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor (FROE) and the spread between the financial sector and the market return (SPREAD). This five-factor model helps to alleviate the pricing anomalies for financial sector stocks and also performs well for nonfinancial sector stocks compared with the Fama and French (2014) five-factor model or the Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2014) four-factor models. We find that the aggregate expected return to financial sector equities correlates negatively with aggregate financial sector ROE, which is puzzling, as ROE is commonly used as a measure of the cost of capital in the financial sector.

Keywords: asset pricing; cost of capital; capital structure; financial intermediation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G12 G21 G24 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2015-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn and nep-ifn
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Working Paper: The Cost of Capital of the Financial Sector (2015)
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