Understanding Industry Betas
45 Pages Posted: 22 Feb 2013
Date Written: December 14, 2012
Abstract
This paper models and explains the dynamics of market betas for 30 US industry portfolios between 1970 and 2009. We use DCC-MIDAS and kernel regression techniques as alternatives to the standard ex-post measures. We find betas to exhibit substantial persistence, time variation, ranking variability, and heterogeneity in their business cycle exposure. While we find only a limited amount of structural breaks in the betas of individual industries, we do identify a common structural break in March 1998. We propose two practical applications to understand the economic significance of these results. We find the cross-sectional dispersion in industry betas to be countercyclical and negatively related to future market returns. We also find DCC-MIDAS betas to outperform other beta measures in terms of limiting the downside risk and ex-post market exposure of a market-neutral minimum-variance strategy.
Keywords: industry betas, component models, kernel, DCC-MIDAS, dispersion in betas, stock return predictability, minimum variance strategies
JEL Classification: C33, E32, G12
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Optimal Investment, Growth Options, and Security Returns
By Jonathan Berk, Richard C. Green, ...
-
By Lu Zhang
-
A Cross-Sectional Test of a Production-Based Asset Pricing Model
-
Equilibrium Cross-Section of Returns
By Joao F. Gomes, Leonid Kogan, ...
-
Equilibrium Cross-Section of Returns
By Joao F. Gomes, Leonid Kogan, ...
-
Capital Investments and Stock Returns
By K.c. John Wei, Feixue Xie, ...
-
Capital Investments and Stock Returns
By K.c. John Wei, Feixue Xie, ...
-
Corporate Investment and Asset Price Dynamics: Implications for the Cross-Section of Returns
By Murray Carlson, Adlai J. Fisher, ...
-
By Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French