The use of price-earnings ratios and dividend-price ratios as forecasting variables for the stock market is examined using aggregate annual US data 1871 to 2000 and aggregate quarterly data for twelve countries since 1970. Various simple efficient-markets models of financial markets imply that these ratios should be useful in forecasting future dividend growth, future earnings growth, or future productivity growth. We conclude that, overall, the ratios do poorly in forecasting any of these. Rather, the ratios appear to be useful primarily in forecasting future stock price changes, contrary to the simple efficient-markets models. This paper is an update of our earlier paper (1998), to take account of the remarkable behavior of the stock market in the closing years of the twentieth century.
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.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Nicholas Barberis & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1997.
"A Model of Investor Sentiment,"
NBER Working Papers
5926, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.