Distributional Dynamics of Fama-French Factors in European Markets

Abstract: The three-factor model of Fama and French has proved to be a seminal contribution to asset pricing theory, and was recently extended to include two more factors, yielding the Fama-French five-factor model. Other proposed augmentations of the three-factor model includes the introduction of a momentum factor by Carthart. The extensive use of such factors in asset pricing theory and investing motivates the study of the distributional properties of the returns of these factors. However, previous studies have focused on subsets of these six factors on the U.S. market. In this thesis, the distributional properties of daily log-returns of the five Fama-French factors and the Carthart momentum factor in European data from 2009 to 2019 are examined. The univariate distributional dynamics of the factor log-returns are modelled as ARMA-NGARCH processes with skewed t distributed driving noise sequences. The Gaussian and t copula are then used to model the joint distributions of these factor log-returns. The models developed are applied to estimate the one-day ahead Value-at-Risk (VaR) in testing data. The estimations of the VaR are backtested to check for correct unconditional coverage and exponentially distributed durations between exceedances. The results suggest that the ARMA-NGARCH processes are a valid approximation of the factor log-returns, and lead to good estimations of the VaR. The results of the multivariate analysis suggest that constant Gaussian and t copulas might be insufficient to model the dependence structure of the factors, and that there might be a need for more flexible copula models with dynamic correlations between factor log-returns.