Stock Return, Dividend Growth and Consumption Growth Predictability Across Markets and Time : Implications for Stock Price Movement

This paper links variation in the predictive regressions for stock returns, dividend growth and consumption growth to economic and market factors. The nature of these links can reveal whether movement in asset prices occurs primarily through the discount rate (risk-free rate or risk premium) or cash flow (economic conditions) channel, while they also help explain the mixed results for predictability reported in the literature. Variation is examined through cross-sectional regressions across fifteen markets and over time using rolling regressions. The cross-sectional and time-varying parameters are regressed against output growth, interest rates and inflation as well as market variables using fixed effects panel as well as both OLS and logit approaches. Panel and time-series predictive regressions based on two approaches that seek to identify periods of high expected returns (high risk premium) are also considered. The key implication for asset pricing is that although movement occurs through both channels, stock return predictability is more dominated by the discount rate channel and consumption growth predictability more so by the cash flow channel. Intuitively, such a difference may arise as investors and households rebalance their asset holdings and consumption at different speeds. There is also some evidence of money illusion through the inflation variable