The variance covariance matrix plays a central role in the inferential theories of high dimensional factor models in finance and economics. Popular regularization methods of directly exploiting sparsity are not directly applicable to many financial problems. Classical methods of estimating the...

Estimating and assessing the risk of a large portfolio is an important topic in financial econometrics and risk management. The risk is often estimated by a substitution of a good estimator of the volatility matrix. However, the accuracy of such a risk estimator for large portfolios is largely...

We document a striking block-diagonal pattern in the factor model residual covariances of the S&P 500 Equity Index constituents, after sorting the assets by their assigned Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) codes. Cognizant of this structure, we propose combining a location-based...

We propose a bootstrap-based robust high-confidence level upper bound (Robust H-CLUB) for assessing the risks of large portfolios. The proposed approach exploits rank-based and quantile-based estimators, and can be viewed as a robust extension of the H-CLUB method (Fan et al., 2015). Such an...

We develop a test for deciding whether the linear spaces spanned by the factor exposures of a large cross-section of assets toward latent systematic risk factors at two distinct points in time are the same. The test uses a panel of asset returns in local windows around the two time points. The...

Portfolio allocation with gross-exposure constraint is an effective method to increase the efficiency and stability of selected portfolios among a vast pool of assets, as demonstrated in Fan et. al. (2008b). The required high-dimensional volatility matrix can be estimated by using high frequency...