Does the Fama and French Five-Factor Model Work Well in Japan?

In this study, we investigate whether the five-factor model by Fama and French (2015) explains well the pricing structure of stocks with long-run data for Japan. We conduct standard cross-section asset pricing tests and examine the additional explanatory power of the new Fama and French factors; robust-minus-weak profitability factor and conservative-minus-aggressive investment factor. We find that robust-minus-weak and the conservative-minus-aggressive factors are not statistically significant when we conduct generalized method of moments (GMM) tests with the Hansen-Jagannathan distance measure. Thus, we conclude that the original version of the Fama and French five-factor model is not the best benchmark pricing model for Japanese data during our sampling period from the year 1978 to the year 2014.