A New Perspective on the Fama–French Five-factor Model

This chapter re-examines the Fama–French (FF) five-factor asset pricing model proposed by Fama and French (2015), since this model has a failure to capture the lower average returns on small stocks and its performance could not fully satisfy the original definitions of those considered factors. From the viewpoint of the econometrics analysis, we consider the inferior performance could be potentially caused by the spurious effect in the five-factor model, which could mislead the statistical inference and yield biased empirical results. We thus employ the CO-AR estimation by Wang and Hafner (2018) to prove the usefulness of the FF five-factor model. Empirical results demonstrate with the CO-AR estimation, the five-factor model indeed properly captures the lower average returns on small stocks and illustrate the sustainability of efficiency of the market, which is in contrast to the findings of Fama and French (2015). However, we propose a new perspective on the seminal five-factor model.