Expectations, Shocks, and Asset Returns

Ricardo Sousa

No 29/2007, NIPE Working Papers from NIPE - Universidade do Minho

Abstract: I use the consumer’s budget constraint to derive a relationship between stock market returns, the residuals of the trend relationship among consumption, aggregate wealth, and labour income, cay, and three major sources of risk: future changes in the housing consumption share, cr, future labour income growth, lr, and future consumption growth, lrc. Using a VAR, I compute measures of expected and unexpected long-run changes of the major determinants of asset returns and find that: (i) cay, cday, expected lr, cr, lrc and expected long-run changes in ex-ante real returns, lrret, strongly forecast future asset returns; (ii) unexpected lrc and unexpected lrret contain some predictive power for asset returns; (iii) unexpected lr and unexpected cr do not predict future asset returns. One can, therefore, use the intertemporal budget constraint and the forecasting properties of an informative VAR to generate the predictability of many economically motivated variables developed in the literature on asset pricing. The framework presented is sufficiently flexible to accommodate the implications of a wide class of optimal models of consumer behaviour without imposing a functional form on preferences.

Keywords: expectations; shocks; asset returns; wealth; income; consumption; housing share. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 E21 E44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www3.eeg.uminho.pt/economia/nipe/docs/2007/NIPE_WP_29_2007.PDF (application/pdf)

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:nip:nipewp:29/2007

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NIPE Working Papers from NIPE - Universidade do Minho Núcleo de Investigação em Políticas Económicas e Empresariais, Escola de Economia e Gestão, Universidade do Minho, P-4710-057 Braga, Portugal. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by NIPE ().