Disentangling systematic and idiosyncratic risk for large panels of assets

When observed over a large panel, measures of risk (such as realized volatilities) usually exhibit a secular trend around which individual risks cluster. In this article we propose a vector Multiplicative Error Model achieving a decomposition of each risk measure into a common systematic and an idiosyncratic component, while allowing for contemporaneous dependence in the innovation process. As a consequence, we can assess how much of the current asset risk is due to a system wide component, and measure the persistence of the deviation of an asset specific risk from that common level. We develop an estimation technique, based on a combination of seminonparametric methods and copula theory, that is suitable for large dimensional panels. The model is applied to two panels of daily realized volatilities between 2001 and 2008: the SPDR Sectoral Indices of the S&P500 and the constituents of the S&P100. Similar results are obtained on the two sets in terms of reverting behavior of the common nonstationary component and the idiosyncratic dynamics to with a variable speed that appears to be sector dependent.