Habit Formation, Surplus Consumption and Return Predictability: International Evidence

On an international post World War II dataset, we use an iterated GMM pro- cedure to estimate and test the Campbell-Cochrane (1999) habit formation model. In addition, we analyze the predictive power of the surplus consumption ratio for future asset returns. We find that, although there are important cross-country differences, for the majority of countries in our sample the model gets empirical support in a variety of diffrent dimensions, including reasonable estimates of risk- free rates, and the model dominates the time-separable power utility model in terms of pricing errors. Further, for the majority of countries the surplus consumption ratio captures time-variation in expected returns. Together with the price-dividend ratio, the surplus consumption ratio contains significant information about future stock returns, also during the 1990s. Finally, in most countries the surplus con- sumption ratio is also a powerful predictor of future bond returns.