Financial regulatory policy uncertainty: An informative predictor for financial industry stock returns

Yaojie Zhang, Xinyi Zhao and Zhikai Zhang

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 2025, vol. 75, issue PB

Abstract: We find that financial regulatory policy uncertainty is an informative indicator for predicting returns of financial industry stocks, outperforming popular predictive variables both in-sample and out-of-sample. Mean-variance investors can achieve substantial economic gains by allocating assets based on the information provided by the financial regulatory policy uncertainty index. Placebo tests suggest that other policy uncertainty indices do not provide predictive information for stock returns of the financial industry, and financial regulatory policy uncertainty cannot forecast stock returns of other industries. We demonstrate that the predictive power of financial regulatory policy uncertainty stems from the cash flow channel, potentially due to the inhibitory effect of uncertainty on firms’ economic activities.

Keywords: Financial regulation policy; Uncertainty; Return predictability; Industry portfolio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062940824002468
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:75:y:2025:i:pb:s1062940824002468

DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2024.102321

Access Statistics for this article

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by Hamid Beladi

More articles in The North American Journal of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().