TY - JOUR AU - Campbell,John Y. TI - Measuring the Persistence of Expected Returns JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 3305 PY - 1991 Y2 - September 1991 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3305 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3305.pdf N1 - Author contact info: John Y. Campbell Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics Department of Economics Harvard University Littauer Center 213 Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-6448 Fax: 617/495-7730 E-Mail: john_campbell@harvard.edu AB - This paper summarizes earlier research On the sources of variation in monthly U.S. stock returns in the period 1927-88. A log-linear model is used to break unexpected returns into changing expectations about future dividends and changing expectations about future returns. Even though stock returns are not highly forecastable, the model attributes one-third of the variation in returns to changing expected returns, one-third to changing future dividends, and one-third to the covariance between these components. Changing expected returns have a large effect on the stock market because their movements are persistent and negatively correlated with changing expected dividends. ER -