Model Comparison with Sharpe Ratios

By Francisco Barillas, Raymond Kan, Cesare Robotti, Jay Shanken. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2019

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We show how to conduct asymptotically valid tests of model comparison when the extent of model mispricing is gauged by the squared Sharpe ratio improvement measure. This is equivalent to ranking models on their maximum Sharpe ratios, effectively extending the Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken (1989) test to accommodate the comparison of nonnested models. Mimicking portfolios can be substituted for any nontraded model factors, and estimation error in the portfolio weights is taken into account in the statistical inference. A variant of the Fama and French (2018) 6-factor model, with a monthly updated version of the usual value spread, emerges as the dominant model.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b477dee639fde593be769ad1dc77b9ce43af184d