We study the relationship between conditional quantiles of returns and the long-, medium- and short-term volatility in a portfolio of financial assets. We argue that the combination of quantile panel regression and wavelet decomposition of the volatility time series provides us with new insights...

We analyze the joint out-of-sample predictive ability of a comprehensive set of 299 firm characteristics for cross-sectional stock returns. We develop a cross-sectional out-of-sample R2 statistic that provides an informative measure of the accuracy of cross-sectional return forecasts in terms of...

We document strong U.S. stock and bond return predictability from several macroeconomic volatility series before 1982. Return predictability declined significantly during the Great Moderation in the post-1982 sample. Our empirical finding is robust to out-of-sample "real time" forecasts in terms...

We survey the literature on stock return forecasting, highlighting the challenges faced by forecasters as well as strategies for improving return forecasts. We focus on U.S. equity premium forecastability and illustrate key issues via an empirical application based on updated data. Some studies...

A model of portfolio return dynamics is considered in which the price of risk is permitted to be heterogeneous. In doing this, a novel method is proposed that delivers improved out-of-sample forecasts of portfolio returns. The main innovation is the use of a set of predictors that account for...

Can the degree of predictability found in the data be explained by existing asset pricing models? We provide two theoretical upper bounds on the R-squares of predictive regressions. Using data on the market and component portfolios, we find that the empirical R-squares are significantly greater...

We show that news stories contain information about economic linkages between firms and document that information diffuses slowly across linked stocks. Specifically, we identify linked stocks from co-mentions in news stories and find that linked stocks cross-predict one another's returns in the...

This paper studies the predictability of ultra high-frequency stock returns and durations to relevant price, volume and transactions events, using machine learning methods. We find that, contrary to low frequency and long horizon returns, where predictability is rare and inconsistent,...

A large set of macroeconomic variables have been suggested as equity risk premium predictors in the literature. This paper proposes a forecasting approach for the equity risk premium with two novel features. First, individual month-ahead forecasts are obtained from parsimonious threshold...

Stock returns predictability has been a long-standing topic in the literature on financial economics. Developments in prediction technology have facilitated the wide use of machine learning techniques, which motivates our study of whether stock returns predictability can be improved using...