A firm's current leverage ratio is one of the core characteristics of credit quality used in statistical default prediction models. Based on the capital structure literature, which shows that leverage is mean-reverting to a target leverage, we forecast future leverage ratios and include them in...

A firm's current leverage ratio is one of the core characteristics of credit quality used in statistical default prediction models. Based on the capital structure literature, which shows that leverage is mean-reverting to a target leverage, we forecast future leverage ratios and include them in...

In this paper, we propose novel predictor variables for forecasting stock market returns. We investigate the predictive power of the demand for gold coins and bars as a proxy for the risk premium consistent with the safe haven property of gold. The gold demand variables reflect the behaviour of...

The economic gains from using equity premium forecasts are usually assessed by comparing a forecast-based strategy to a strategy based on the trailing historical mean. Whether these economic gains are statistically significant remains mostly untested. This paper shows that a buy-and-hold...

This paper reappraises the usefulness of forecast combination for predicting the US equity premium. For comparison, we also include penalized regression and dimension reduction approaches. We fail to find evidence of predictive ability in recent decades, regardless of the forecasting method...