In this paper, we revisit the question whether the Fama-French factors are manifestations of distress risk premiums. To this end, we develop new tests specifically aimed at dissecting the Fama-French factor returns from a distress risk premium. While we find that small-cap and value exposures...

We examine 24 global factor premiums across the main asset classes via replication and new-sample evidence spanning 217 years of data. Replication yields ambiguous evidence within a unified testing framework with methods that account for p-hacking. The new-sample evidence reveals that the large...