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Macroeconomic factors and equity premium predictability

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  • Buncic, Daniel
  • Tischhauser, Martin

Abstract

Neely et al. (2014) have recently demonstrated how to efficiently combine information from a set of popular technical indicators together with the standard Goyal and Welch (2008) predictor variables widely used in the equity premium forecasting literature to improve out-of-sample forecasts of the equity premium using a small number of principal components. We show that forecasts of the equity premium can be further improved by, first, incorporating broader macroeconomic data into the information set, second, improving the selection of the most relevant factors and combining the most relevant factors by means of a forecast combination regression, and third, imposing theoretically motivated positivity constraints on the forecasts of the equity premium. We find that in particular our proposed forecast combination approach, which combines forecasts of the most relevant Neely et al. (2014) and macroeconomic factors and further imposes positivity constraints on the equity premium forecasts, generates statistically significant and economically sizeable improvements over the best performing model of Neely et al. (2014).

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  • Buncic, Daniel & Tischhauser, Martin, 2017. "Macroeconomic factors and equity premium predictability," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 621-644.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:reveco:v:51:y:2017:i:c:p:621-644
    DOI: 10.1016/j.iref.2017.07.006
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    5. Oguzhan Cepni & Rangan Gupta & I. Ethem Güney & M. Yilmaz, 2020. "Forecasting local currency bond risk premia of emerging markets: The role of cross‐country macrofinancial linkages," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(6), pages 966-985, September.
    6. Souropanis, Ioannis & Vivian, Andrew, 2023. "Forecasting realized volatility with wavelet decomposition," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Equity premium predictability; Factor models; Macroeconomic variables; Adaptive Lasso; Sign restrictions; Forecast combination; Asset allocation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G17 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Financial Forecasting and Simulation
    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy

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