NBER Working Papers by Anisha Ghosh

The predictability of the market return and dividend growth is addressed in an equilibrium model with two regimes. A state variable that drives the conditional means of the aggregate consumption and dividend growth rates follows different time-series processes in the two regimes. In linear predictive regressions over 1930-2009, the market return is predictable by the price-dividend ratio with R2 11.7% if the probability of being in the first regime exceeds 50%; and dividend growth is predictable by the price-dividend ratio with R2 28.3% if the probability of being in the second regime exceeds 50%. The model-implied state variables perform significantly better at predicting the equity, size, and value premia, the aggregate consumption and dividend growth rates, and the variance of the marke...

A novel methodology in testing the long-run risks model of Bansal and Yaron (2004) is presented based on the observation that, under the null, the potentially latent state variables, "long-run risk" and the conditional variance of its innovation, are known a¢ ne functions of the observable market-wide price-dividend ratio and risk free rate. In linear forecasting regressions of consumption growth and returns by the price-dividend ratio and risk free rate, the model implies much higher forecastability than what is observed in the data over 1931 –2009. The co-integrated variant of the model by Bansal, Gallant, and Tauchen (2007), also implies much higher forecastability of returns than what is observed in the data. Finally, we reject the models' implications in jointly pricing the cross-sect...