Tug-of-War: Time-Varying Predictability of Stock Returns and Dividend Growth*

Abstract

We propose a regime-switching present-value model with latent variables to jointly investigate the predictability of stock returns and dividend growth. We find that both return predictability and dividend growth predictability are time-varying. Interestingly, the predictability of stock returns and dividend growth is a tug-of-war contest: when dividend growth is highly predictable in the high-volatility regime, stock returns are largely unpredictable; in contrast, when dividend growth is less predictable in the low-volatility regime, stock returns are significantly predictable. We also investigate macroeconomic determinants of regime switches and find that two regimes are intimately related to macroeconomic risk and economic activity.