Efficient Sorting: A More Powerful Test for Cross-Sectional Anomalies

Olivier Ledoit, Michael Wolf and Zhao Zhao

No 238, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Many researchers seek factors that predict the cross-section of stock returns. The standard methodology sorts stocks according to their factor scores into quantiles and forms a corresponding long-short portfolio. Such a course of action ignores any information on the covariance matrix of stock returns. Historically, it has been difficult to estimate the covariance matrix for a large universe of stocks. We demonstrate that using the recent DCC-NL estimator of Engle et al. (2017) substantially enhances the power of tests for cross-sectional anomalies: On average, 'Student' t-statistics more than double.

Keywords: Cross-section of returns; dynamic conditional correlations; GARCH; Markowitz portfolio selection; nonlinear shrinkage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C58 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12, Revised 2018-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:238

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