A comparison of factor models in China

Abstract

We evaluate the performance of eleven asset pricing models in the Chinese A-share market using a variety of test portfolios and statistical methodologies. To compile the test portfolios, we construct 105 anomalies and use the 23 significant anomalies as test assets for model comparison. The results indicate that, in time-series test and anomaly explanations, the Hou et al. (2019) five-factor q model demonstrates the best overall performance. The pairwise cross-sectional $R^2$ tests and multiple model comparison tests further affirm that the Hou et al. (2019) five-factor q model, the Fama and French (2018) six-factor (FF6) model, and the Kelly et al. (2019) five-factor Instrumented Principal Component Analysis (IPCA5) model are the top performers. Notably, the performance of the five-factor q model remains robust across various experimental designs.