The Alternative Three-Factor Model: an Alternative beyond U.S. Markets?

Abstract

We investigate the performance of the alternative three-factor model across markets. The important US evidence of Chen et al. (2010) in favour of the alternative model does not translate to a test setting using data from 40 non-US stock markets. The three-factor model of Fama and French provides persistently a better description of average returns. Our analysis is robust across developed and emerging markets, robust to alternative measures of investment and profitability, to seasonality effects, to size-segmented subsamples and subperiods, to various test assets, and to the two-stage cross-section regression approach to test for priced factors.