Covariance estimation: do new methods outperform old ones?

Journal of Economics and Finance - Tập 34 - Trang 187-195 - 2009
Lan Liu1, Hao Lin1
1College of Business Administration, California State University Sacramento, Sacramento, USA

Tóm tắt

This paper compares three new methods of estimating the asset returns covariance and evaluates their performances with the conventional covariance estimation methods. We find that taking a simple average of the historical sample covariance matrix and the covariance matrix estimated from the single-index model provides the best overall performance among all competing methods. In addition, we find that commonly used assessment criteria provide systematically different rankings, which explains the preferences to different types of estimation methods in the existing literature. We believe the difference between our results and those of previous studies may be partly due to the differences in the ratio of the time series observations to the number of stocks in the samples that have been used in different studies.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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