A Study on Cross-sectional Power of a Liquidity Risk Factor in Korea Stock Market
SangYong Yun
BonIl Ku
YoungHo Yeom
JaeHoon Hahn
Fama and French (1993) propose a three-factor asset pricing model which uses a proxy for the market portfolio and mimicking portfolios designed to capture the size and book-to-market effects in stock returns. Empirical applications of this threefactor model in Korea, however, can be problematic because i) the book-to-market effect in the cross section of stock returns is not significant, and ii) the size factor (SMB) and the book-to-market factor (HML) are highly correlated. In this paper, we propose a three-factor asset pricing model which uses a mimicking portfolio designed to capture liquidity risk in place of HML as an alternative to the Fama-French threefactor model. We find that our alternative model performs better than the Fama- French model in explaining the cross section of average stock returns in primarily due to the significant explanatory power of the proposed liquidity factor proxy. The results are robust in both sub-samples (before and after the year 2000), and the significance of the liquidity factor proxy is stronger for the post-2000 sample period.