COVID-19 pandemic is an extreme event that created a turmoil in stock markets around the world. This unexpected circumstance poses a critical question whether the prevailing models can help predict the plummets of indices, hence the returns. In this study, we model the stock returns using...

According to present-value models, a financial valuation ratio should predict future stock returns or cash flows but empirically shows little power. This paper develops insights about stock return predictability and reconciles the contradicting findings. We decompose a financial ratio into (1) a...

In this paper, we test for the structural stability of both bivariate and multivariate predictive regression models for equity premium in South Africa over the period of 1990:01 to 2010:12, based on 23 financial and macroeconomic variables. We employ a wide range of methodologies, namely, the...

Economic theory identifies two potential sources of return predictability: time variation in expected returns (beta-predictability) or market inefficiencies (alpha-predictability). For the latter, Samuelson argued that macro-returns exhibit more inefficiencies than micro-returns, as individual...

A model of portfolio return dynamics is considered in which the price of risk is permitted to be heterogeneous. In doing this, a novel method is proposed that delivers improved out-of-sample forecasts of portfolio returns. The main innovation is the use of a set of predictors that account for...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

Stock markets proved to be statistically predictable on an economically interesting scale over the past decade by fully data driven automatically constructed maps that associate to a set of new factor values a return prediction that is the average of historically observed returns for an area in...

This article comprehensively reviews the predictability of six equity factors. These factors are the market excess return, size, value, momentum, low beta and quality. I find predictability for the low beta factor and moderate predictability for the size factor. The results for other factors are...

This paper studies return predictability in federal funds futures. I show that over the period 1990 to 2018, predictor variables from the literature do not consistently outperform the expectations hypothesis when evaluated out-of-sample. Further, while forecasts from advanced forecasting methods...

We re-examine diversification benefits of investing in commodities and currencies by considering a risk-averse investor with mean-variance preferences who exploits the possibility of predictable time variation in asset return means, variances, and covariances. We implement unconditional and...