Risk premium contributions of the Fama and French mimicking factors

We take a new look on the Fama and French (1993) three-factor asset pricing model by extracting risk premium contributions for each factor based on solving a system of linear equations. The risk premium contributions become uncorrelated with the underlying factor excess returns and capture the isolated compensation of a given risk factor. We show that the risk premium contributions feature a January-seasonality, which exhibits a negative shift after the year 1993. Furthermore we find that after 1993 the risk premium contributions of the SMB and HML factor are strongly related to sentiment and predictable by dividend yield.