Asymptotics of the principal components estimator of large factor models with weakly influential factors
弱影响因子下大型因子模型主成分估计量的渐近理论
This paper introduces a drifting-parameter asymptotic framework to derive accurate approximations to the finite sample distribution of the principal components (PC) estimator in situations when the factors’ explanatory power does not strongly dominate the explanatory power of the cross-sectionally and temporally correlated idiosyncratic terms. Under our asymptotics, the PC estimator is inconsistent. We find explicit formulae for the amount of the inconsistency, and propose…