The Analysis of an Investment Risk Within Emerging Capital Markets. The Case of the Warsaw Stock Exchange

The purpose of the paper is to show that the three-factor Fama-French model can be a good instrument for analysis of investment risk on emerging capital markets if, because of the relatively small number of quoted companies, for calculation of the SMB and HML values we applied division of all companies into four portfolios (contrary to Fama – French who propose division of all companies into six portfolios). The usefulness of the above concept was verified on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The models estimated with the Generalized Least Squares Method on monthly data within the period 1994 – 2008 have the signs of coefficients which are consistent with those of the Fama-French three-factor model and there is no autocorrelation of disturbances and no ARCH effect. Models are relatively high adjusted. Estimated coefficients are also robust. The models fully confirm the thesis posed by Fama and French that in addition to market risk there are two other risk factors which influence the return on investment. These are: risk associated with investing in small companies and risk connected with investing in companies undervalued by the market.efficient market hypothesis, Fama-French three-factor model, Generalized Least Squares Method

Market ecology of active and passive investors

We study the role of active and passive investors in an investment market with uncertainties. Active investors concentrate on a single or a few stocks with a given probability of determining the quality of them. Passive investors spread their investment uniformly, resembling buying the market index. In this toy market stocks are introduced as good and bad. If a stock receives sufficient investment it will survive, otherwise die. Active players exert a selective pressure since they can determine to an extent the investment quality. We show that the active players provide the driving force whereas the passive ones act as free riders. While their gains do not differ too much, we show that the active players enjoy an edge. Their presence also provides better gains to the passive players and stocks themselves.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

Testing Conditional Asset Pricing Models: An Emerging Market Perspective

The CAPM as the benchmark asset pricing model generally performs poorly in both developed and emerging markets. We investigate whether allowing the model parameters to vary improves the performance of the CAPM and the Fama-French model. Conditional asset pricing models scaled by conditional variables such as Trading Volume and Dividend Yield generally result in small pricing errors. However, a graphical analysis shows that the predictions of conditional models are generally upward biased. We demonstrate that the bias in prediction may be caused by not accommodating frequent large variation in asset pricing models. In emerging markets, volatile institutional, political and macroeconomic conditions results in thick tails in the return distribution. This is characterized by excess kurtosis. It is found that the unconditional Fama-French model augmented with a cubic market factor performs the best among the competing models. This model is also more parsimonious compared to the conditional Fama-French model in terms of number of parameters.Stochastic discount factor; conditional information; kurtosis; emerging markets

Semiparametric Estimation of aCharacteristic-based Factor Model ofCommon Stock Returns

We introduce an alternative version of the Fama-French three-factor model of stockreturns together with a new estimation methodology. We assume that the factorbetas in the model are smooth nonlinear functions of observed securitycharacteristics. We develop an estimation procedure that combines nonparametrickernel methods for constructing mimicking portfolios with parametric nonlinearregression to estimate factor returns and factor betas simultaneously. Themethodology is applied to US common stocks and the empirical findings comparedto those of Fama and French.characteristic-based factor model, arbitrage pricing theory, kernelestimation, nonparametric estimation.

Pricing the Global Industry Portfolios

We investigate the ability of several international asset pricing models to price the returns on 36 FTSE global industry portfolios. The models are the international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) the ICAPM with exchange risks, and global two-factor and three-factor Fama-French (1996, 1998) models. We apply the methodology of Hansen and Jagannathan (1997). While all of the models can correctly price the basic assets, exchange risks are unimportant and only the global three-factor Fama-French model passes a robustness check which requires the models to also price portfolios sorted by book-to-market ratio.