Journal of Data Science

Abstract: The traditional approach by Fama and Macbeth (1973) to the validity of an asset pricing model suffers from two drawbacks. Firstly, it uses the ordinary least squares (OLS) method, which is sensitive to outliers, to estimate the time-series beta. Secondly, it takes averages of the slope coefficients from cross-sectional regressions which ignore the importance of time-series properties. In this article, robust estimators and a longitudinal approach are applied to avoid the problems of these two kinds. We use data on the electronics industry in Taiwan’s stock market during the period from September 1998 to December 2001 in order to examine whether betas from the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) are a valid measure of risk and whether industries to which the firms belong explain excess returns. The methods we propose lead to more explanatory power than the traditional OLS results.