Asset selection using Factor Model and Data Envelope Analysis - A Quantile Regression approach

Abstract

With the growing number of stocks and other financial instruments in the investment market, there is always a need for profitable methods of asset selection. The Fama-French three factor model, makes the problem of asset selection easy, by narrowing down the number of parameters, but the usual technique of Ordinary Least Square (OLS), used for estimation of the coefficients of the three factors suffers from the problem of modelling using the conditional mean of the distribution, as is the case with OLS. In this paper, we use the technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) applied to the Fama-French Three Factor Model, to choose stocks from Dow Jones Industrial Index. We use a more robust technique called as Quantile Regression to estimate the coefficients for the factor model and show that the assets selected using this regression method form a higher return equally weighted portfolio.Asset Selection, Factor Model, DEA, Quantile Regression