Is Beta Still Useful over a Longer-Horizon?: An Implied Cost of Capital Approach

Abstract

Despite the crucial role of the market factor in Fama and French’s three-factor model, the market beta has failed to explain the cross-sectional differences in expected returns proxied by the future realized returns of individual stocks. However, current evidence does not necessarily reject the explanatory power of the market beta in expected returns over longer-horizons. We use the future implied costs of capital as the proxy instead of future realized returns in order to link beta to longer-horizon expected returns. In contrast to the current results we find that the future implied cost of capital is both positively and significantly related to the conventional beta estimate, implying that beta could still explain future cross-sectional expected return differences. Moreover, uncertainty risk could be important when focusing on longer-horizons. We propose using analyst dispersion as a proxy for the uncertainty risk, and find that it strongly predicts future implied cost of capital as well.