Abstract
The Sharpe ratio function is a commonly used risk/return measure in financial econometrics. To estimate this function, most existing methods take a two-step procedure that first estimates the mean and volatility functions separately and then applies the plug-in method. In this paper, we propose a direct method via local maximum likelihood to simultaneously estimate the Sharpe ratio function and the negative log-volatility function as well as their derivatives. We establish the joint limiting distribution of the proposed estimators, and moreover extend the proposed method to estimate the multivariate Sharpe ratio function. We also evaluate the numerical performance of the proposed estimators through simulation studies, and compare them with existing methods. Finally, we apply the proposed method to the three-month US Treasury bill data and that captures a well-known covariate-dependent effect on the Sharpe ratio.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the editor, associate editor, and two referees for their constructive suggestions and comments that have substantially improved an earlier version of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).