This result supports the theorem of "
small firm effect," which argues that the smaller-cap firms tend to outperform the larger ones in the stock market, as smaller firms may have presumably greater potentials for growth and also higher risk.
It involves the so-called Fama-French
Small Firm Effect, which came out of the University of Chicago in the early 1980s.
It follows that liquidity can help explain a number of puzzles, such as why equities commanding high required returns (the equity premium puzzle), why liquid risk-free treasuries have low required returns (the risk-free rate puzzle), and why small stocks that are typically illiquid earn high returns (the
small firm effect).
Many mutual funds and institutions subsequently exploit this
small firm effect by purchasing small capitalization stocks.
This revised return series appears to provide even stronger support for the investor sentiment hypothesis, but it also hints of a January
small firm effect. Table 2 presents the impact of the January seasonal on the level and monotonicity of the adjusted [R.sup.2]s using the revised series.
A
small firm effect of 6.12% is also consistent with the declining
small firm effect since its general dissemination by Reinganum in 1979.
After reviewing the relevant literature on the
small firm effect, McMahon rom.
The tendency of small firms to have greater risk-adjusted security returns than larger companies is referred to as the
small firm effect. Klein and Bawa (1977) and Zeghal (1983) indicate that the availability of information may be the causal factor behind the
small firm effect.
These anomalies include: the "weekend effect," where average returns from trading on Mondays tend to be systematically negative; the January effect"' which makes the average returns on all stocks positive in January; and the
small firm effect'" where the risk-adjusted returns on the stocks of relatively small corporations are greater than the risk-adjusted returns for large corporations.
The choice of the market value as a proxy variable for the thinness of a security and the relationship between intervalling effect bias in beta and thinness would suggest that the intervalling effect could explain the size or
small firm effect discovered by Banz (1981).