Structural Breaks and Predictive Regressions Models of South African Equity Premium

In this paper, we test for the structural stability of both bivariate and multivariate predictive regression models for equity premium in South Africa over the period of 1990:01 to 2010:12, based on 23 financial and macroeconomic variables. We employ a wide range of methodologies, namely, the popular Andrews (1993) statistic and the Bai (1997) subsample procedure in conjunction with the Hansen (2000) heteroskedastic fixed-regressor bootstrap. We also used the Elliott and Muller (2003) statistic and Bai and Perron (1998, 2003a, 2004) methodologies. We find strong evidence of at least two structural breaks in 22 of 23 bivariate predictive regression models. We also obtain evidence of structural instability in the multivariate predictive regression models of equity premium. Our results also show that the predictive ability of the 23 variables can vary widely across different regimes.