This paper shows that the surplus consumption ratio, specified by Campbell and Cochrane [1999. Journal of Political Economy 107, 205-251], is a good predictor of excess returns at long horizons. We also provide empirical evidence that this variable captures a component of expected returns, not explained by the proxies for the consumption to wealth ratio, cay and cdy, proposed by Lettau and Ludvigson [2001a. Journal of Finance 56, 815-849; 2001b. Journal of Political Economy 109, 1238-1286; 2005. Journal of Financial Economics 76, 583-626]. Moreover, used as a conditioning information for the Consumption based Asset Pricing Model (C)CAPM, the resulting linear model helps to explain for the variation in average returns across the Fama-French (25) portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market characteristics.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.