When a rate of return is regressed on a lagged stochastic regressor, such as a dividend yield, the regression disturbance is correlated with the regressor's innovation. The OLS estimator's "nite-sample properties, derived here, can depart substantially from the standard regression setting. Bayesian posterior distributions for the regression parameters are obtained under speci"cations that di!er with respect to (i) prior beliefs about the autocorrelation of the regressor and (ii) whether the initial observation of the regressor is speci"ed as "xed or stochastic. The posteriors di!er across such speci"cations, and asset allocations in the presence of estimation risk exhibit sensitivity to those

The share of equity issues in total new equity and debt issues is a strong predictor of U.S. stock market returns between 1928 and 1997. In particular, firms issue relatively more equity than debt just before periods of low market returns. The equity share in new issues has stable predictive power in both halves of the sample period and after controlling for other known predictors. We do not find support for efficient market explanations of the results. Instead, the fact that the equity share sometimes predicts significantly negative market returns suggests inefficiency and that firms time the market component of their returns when issuing securities.

Given the historically high equity premium, is it now a good time to invest in the stock market? Economists have suggested a whole range of variables that investors could or should use to predict: dividend price ratios, dividend yields, earnings-price ratios, dividend payout ratios, net issuing ratios, book-market ratios, interest rates (in various guises), and consumptionbased macroeconomic ratios (cay). The typical paper reports that the variable predicted well in an in-sample regression, implying forecasting ability. Our paper explores the out-of-sample performance of these variables, and finds that not a single one would have helped a real-world investor outpredicting the then-prevailing historical equity premium mean. Most would have outright hurt. Therefore, we find that, for all practical purposes, the equity premium has not been predictable, and any belief about whether the stock market is now too high or too low has to be based on theoretical prior, not on the empirically variables we have explored.

I review empirical research on the relation between capital markets and financial statements.The principal sources of demand for capital markets research in accounting are fundamental analysis and valuation, tests of market efficiency, and the role of accounting numbers in contracts and the political process.The capital markets research topics of current interest to researchers include tests of market efficiency with respect to accounting information, fundamental analysis, and value relevance of financial reporting.Evidence from research on these topics is likely to be helpful in capital market investment decisions, accounting standard setting, and corporate financial

Trading Activity and Expected Stock Returns Given the evidence that the level of liquidity aects asset returns, a reasonable hypothesis is that the second moment of liquidity should be positively related to asset returns, provided agents care about the risk associated with uctuations in liquidity. Motivated by this observation, we analyze the relation between expected equity returns and the level as well as the volatility of trading activity (a proxy for liquidity) . We document a result contrary to our initial hypothesis, namely, a negative and surprisingly strong cross-sectional relationship between stock returns and the variability of dollar trading volume and share turnover, after controlling for size, bookto -market, momentum, and the level of dollar volume or share turnover. This eect survives a number of robustness checks and is statistically and economically signi#- cant. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of trading activity-related variables in the cross-section of ex...

If returns are not predictable, dividend growth must be predictable, to generate the observed variation in divided yields. I find that the absence of dividend growth predictability gives stronger evidence than does the presence of return predictability. Long-horizon return forecasts give the same strong evidence. These tests exploit the negative correlation of return forecasts and dividend-yield autocorrelation across samples, together with sensible upper bounds on dividend-yield autocorrelation, to deliver more powerful statistics. I reconcile my findings with the literature that finds poor power in long-horizon return forecasts, and with the literature that notes the poor out-of-sample R² of return-forecasting regressions.

Goyal and Welch (2006) argue that the historical average excess stock return forecasts future excess stock returns better than regressions of excess returns on predictor variables. In this paper we show that many predictive regressions beat the historical average return, once weak restrictions are imposed on the signs of coefficients and return forecasts. The out-of-sample explanatory power is small, but nonetheless is economically meaningful for mean-variance investors. Even better results can be obtained by imposing the restrictions of steady-state valuation models, thereby removing the need to estimate the average from a short sample of volatile stock returns. Towards the end of the last century, academic finance economists came to take seriously the view that aggregate stock returns are predictable. During the 1980’s a number of papers studied valuation ratios, such as the dividend-price ratio, earningsprice ratio, or smoothed earnings-price ratio. Value-oriented investors in the tradition of Graham and Dodd (1934) had always asserted that high valuation ratios are an indication of an undervalued stock market and should predict high subsequent returns, but these ideas did not carry much weight in the academic literature until authors such as Rozeff (1984), Fama and French (1988), and Campbell and Shiller (1988a,b) found that valuation ratios are positively correlated with subsequent returns and that the implied predictability of returns is substantial at longer horizons. Around the same time, several papers pointed out that yields on short- and long-term Treasury and corporate bonds are correlated with subsequent stock returns [Fama and Schwert

A growing number of researchers argue that time-series patterns in returns are due to investor irrationality and thus can be translated into abnormal profits. Continuation of short-term returns or momentum is one such pattern that has defied any rational explanation and is at odds with market efficiency. This paper shows that profits to momentum strategies can be explained by a set of lagged macroeconomic variables and payoffs to momentum strategies disappear once stock returns are adjusted for their predictability based on these macroeconomic variables. Our results provide a possible role for time-varying expected returns as an explanation for momentum payoffs. THIS PAPER EXAMINES THE RELATIVE importance of common factors and firmspecific information in explaining the profitability of momentum-based trading strategies, first documented by Jegadeesh and Titman ~1993!. The profitability of momentum strategies has been particularly intriguing, as it remains the only CAPM-related anomaly unexplained by the Fama–French

In this paper, we analyze the economic value of predicting index returns as well as volatility. On the basis of fairly simple linear models, estimated recursively, we produce genuine out-of-sample forecasts for the return on the S&P 500 index and its volatility. Using monthly data from 1954 to 1998, we test the statistical significance of return and volatility predictability and examine the economic value of a number of alternative trading strategies.

We propose a direct and convenient reduced-bias estimator of predictive regression coefficients, assuming that the regressors are Gaussian first-order autoregressive with errors that are correlated with the error series of the dependent variable. For the single-regressor model, Stambaugh (1999) shows that the ordinary least squares estimator of the predictive regression coefficient is biased in small samples. Our estimation method employs an augmented regression which uses a proxy for the errors in the autoregressive model. We also develop a heuristic estimator of the standard error of the estimated predictive coefficient which performs well in simulations. We analyze the case of multiple predictors that are first-order autoregressive and derive bias expressions for both the ordinary least squares and our reduced-bias estimated coefficients. The effectiveness of our estimation method is demonstrated by simulations.