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A Comprehensive Look at the Empirical Performance of Equity Premium Prediction

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  • Amit Goyal
  • Ivo Welch

Abstract

Economists have suggested a whole range of variables that predict the equity premium: dividend price ratios, dividend yields, earnings-price ratios, dividend payout ratios, corporate or net issuing ratios, book-market ratios, beta premia, interest rates (in various guises), and consumption-based macroeconomic ratios (cay). Our paper comprehensively reexamines the performance of these variables, both in-sample and out-of-sample, as of 2005. We find that [a] over the last 30 years, the prediction models have failed both in-sample and out-of-sample; [b] the models are unstable, in that their out-of-sample predictions have performed unexpectedly poorly; [c] the models would not have helped an investor with access only to information available at the time to time the market.

Suggested Citation

  • Amit Goyal & Ivo Welch, 2004. "A Comprehensive Look at the Empirical Performance of Equity Premium Prediction," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2412, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Jan 2006.
  • Handle: RePEc:ysm:wpaper:amz2412
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Equity Premium; Prediction; Stock Market;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

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