Value-At-Risk and Expected Stock Returns: Evidence from Pakistan
The Lahore Journal of Economics 19 : 2 (Winter 2014): pp. 71–100 Value-at-Risk and Expected Stock Returns: Evidence from Pakistan Javed Iqbal* and Sara Azher** Abstract This study investigates whether exposure to downside risk, as measured by value-at-risk (VaR), explains expected returns in an emerging market, i.e., Pakistan. We find that portfolios with a higher VaR are associated with higher average returns. In order to explore the empirical performance of VaR at the portfolio level, we use a time series approach based on 25 size and book-to-market portfolios. Based on monthly portfolio data for October 1992 to June 2008, the results show that VaR has greater explanatory power than the market, size, and book-to-market factors. Keywords: Value-at-risk, emerging market, Fama-French factors. JEL classification: C32, G32. 1. Introduction The most important implications of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) (see Sharpe, 1964; Lintner, 1969; Black, Jensen, & Scholes, 1972) are that (i) the expected return on a risky asset is linearly and positively related to its systematic risk, and (ii) only the asset’s beta captures cross- sectional variations in expected stock returns; other variables have no explanatory power. However, the empirical evidence of the last few decades suggests that many alternative risk and nonrisk variables are able to explain average stock returns. These include size (Banz, 1981), the ratio of book equity to market equity (Fama & French, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996; Stattman, 1980; Rosenberg, Reid, & Lanstein, 1985; Chan, Hamao, & Lakonishok, 1991), the price/earnings ratio (Basu, 1977), leverage (Bhandari, 1988), liquidity (Pastor & Stambaugh, 2003), and value-at-risk (VaR) (Bali & Cakici, 2004; Chen, Chen, & Chen, 2010).
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