Margin Requirements, Risk Taking, and Multifactor Models Ferhat Akbas College of Business Administration University of Illinois – Chicago Chicago, IL 60607
[email protected] Lezgin Ay Ivy College of Business Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011
[email protected] Chao Jiang Moore School of Business University of South Carolina Columbia, SC 29208
[email protected] Paul D. Koch* Ivy College of Business Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011
[email protected] Abstract When investors anticipate the Fed increasing margin requirements, they bid up the riskier stocks in the long legs of hedge portfolios associated with the market, HML, and SMB factors relative to the less risky stocks in the short legs. Following such a policy change, the returns on these hedge portfolios decline, implying lower subsequent compensation for bearing the risk associated with these three factors. In contrast, margin requirements are unrelated to returns on the momentum factor. Our evidence suggests that investors adjust their risk exposures to the market, SMB, and HML factors when leverage constraints are changed, but not momentum. JEL Classification : G12, G14, G41. Key Words: Asset pricing, CAPM, multifactor models, security market line, leverage constraints, margin requirements, risk premia. *Corresponding author. We thank Rohit Allena, Ginka Borisova, Jamie Brown, Arnie Cowan, Truong Duong, Wayne Ferson, Lei Gao, Tyler Jensen, David Lesmond, Tingting Liu, Stanley Peterburgsky, Travis Sapp, Xiaolu Wang, and seminar participants at Iowa State University, Financial Management Association Conference, and the Southern Finance Association Conference. I. Introduction According to Black (1972) and Frazzini and Pedersen (2014), when investors face the prospect of tighter leverage constraints, they may respond by overweighting riskier stocks to obtain their desired level of overall risk that cannot be achieved through leverage.