The economic interpretation of stochastic discount factor (SDF) loadings

Question

I'm trying to use the methodology proposed in the article "Taming the Factor Zoo: A Test of New Factors" to evaluate whether some new factors can have significant explanatory power on asset prices beyond the set of previously proposed factors. In the paper, they assess a new potential factor by looking at the significance of its estimated SDF loading. However, little is said about the sign of the SDF loadings and the connection to marginal utility.

From what I've been able to find in other papers, only the absolute value and significance of SDF loadings tend to be considered to say something about the pricing power of the factor. Is it not possible to make more nuanced inferences addressing things like the sign of the SDF loading and the connection to marginal utility?

For instance, if I were to test a new factor capturing company controversy level, how would I interpret a significant and positive SDF loading on this factor? What if it's negative? How does the sign relate to marginal utility?

Answer 1

Hey I've run into this problem as well awhile back I was trying to webscrape data and make a synthetic dataset on a few thousand publicly listed companies. Questions were answered by a locally run LLM that had access to the webscraped data. Questions included some pretty unethical stuff but the reasoning was solid. My advice is to use the new information you have to filter out potentially bad investments or perhaps to take advantage of the volatility a of a controversy.

A positive SDF loading on a factor like company controversy could imply that higher controversy levels (perhaps counterintuitively) coincide with higher utility states—this might occur if, for instance, controversy is linked to higher attention and potentially higher short-term returns in certain contexts.

A negative SDF loading suggests that higher controversy drives the state towards lower utility, aligning more intuitively with expectations that increased controversy might reflect higher company risk or ethical concerns impacting long-term value.