Size and Value Matter, But Not the Way You Thought
58 Pages Posted: 20 Aug 2015 Last revised: 28 Jul 2016
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Size and Value Matter, But Not the Way You Thought
Size and Value Matter, But Not the Way You Thought
Date Written: August 19, 2015
Abstract
Fama and French risk premiums do not reliably estimate the magnitude of the size or book-to-market effects, inducing many researchers to inflate the number of factors. We object that controlling ex ante for noise in the estimation procedure enables to keep a parsimonious set of factors. We replace Fama and French’s independent rankings with the conditional ones introduced by Lambert and Hübner (2013). This alternative framework generates much stronger “turn-of-the-year” size and “through-the-year” book-to-market effects than conventionally documented. Furthermore, the factors deliver less specification errors when used to price portfolios, especially regarding the “small angels” (low size – high B/M stocks).
Keywords: size, value, small angels, Fama and French, sequential sorting, January effects
JEL Classification: G11, G12
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation