Shrinking the cross-section
对股票收益横截面进行收缩估计
We construct a robust stochastic discount factor (SDF) summarizing the joint explanatory power of a large number of cross-sectional stock return predictors. Our method achieves robust out-of-sample performance in this high-dimensional setting by imposing an economically motivated prior on SDF coefficients that shrinks contributions of low-variance principal components of the candidate characteristics-based factors. We find that characteristics-sparse SDFs formed from a few…