A number of studies have investigated the predictability of Chinese stock returns with economic variables. Given the newly emerged dataset from the Internet, this paper investigates whether the Baidu Index can be employed to predict Chinese stock returns. The empirical results show that 1) the...

This paper incorporates the Baidu Index into various heterogeneous autoregressive type time series models and shows that the Baidu Index is a superior predictor of realized volatility in the SSE 50 Index. Furthermore, the predictability of the Baidu Index is found to rise as the forecasting...