Time: 1:00 - 2:00pm Venue: Mile End Campus, Bancroft Building, Room 4.04/04
Tolga Cenesizoglu, HEC Montreal
Return Decomposition over the Business Cycle
To analyze the determinants of the observed variation in stock prices, Campbell and Shiller (1988) suggest decomposing stock returns into unexpected changes in investors’ beliefs about future cash flows and discount rates. Based on a generalization of this approach to a regime-switching framework, we analyze the conditional variance decomposition of the market return over the business cycle. We find that discount rate news is more important than cash flow news in determining the conditional variance of the market return in recessions while the opposite holds in expansions.We show that this empirical finding can be explained by a stylized asset pricing model with regime-switching fundamentals.
13:00 - 14:00pmLunch will be provided in the 4th floor kitchen from 12.30pm.