Shrinking Factor Dimension: A Reduced-Rank Approach

Abstract

We provide a reduced-rank approach (RRA) to extract a few factors from a large set of factor proxies and apply the extracted factors to model the cross-section of expected stock returns. Empirically, we find that the RRA five-factor model outperforms the well-known Fama–French five-factor model as well as the corresponding principal component analysis, partial least squares, and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator models for pricing portfolios. However, at the stock level, our RRA factor model still has large pricing errors even after adding more factors, suggesting that the representative factor proxies of our study do not have sufficient information for pricing individual stocks.This paper was accepted by Lukas Schmid, finance.