Stock Price Movements: Business-Cycle and Low-Frequency Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract We find that a business-cycle component of the aggregate dividend yield strongly predicts short-term aggregate dividend growth and consumption growth, whereas its low-frequency counterpart significantly forecasts long-horizon market returns. The dividend yield—the sum of these two components—has difficulty revealing variations in expected cash flow growth, because its low-frequency component tends to disguise such variations. Yet the low-frequency component has significant forecasting power for multiperiod returns at horizons of several years to as long as around 20 years, which is longer than the horizons typically exploited in prior studies that provide weak statistical evidence to challenge multiperiod return predictability. (JEL G12, G17) Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.