Forecasting equity premium in a panel of OECD countries: The role of economic policy uncertainty

This paper investigates whether the news-based measure of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) could help in forecasting the equity premium (excess returns) in ten (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom (UK), and United States (US)) Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. We analyze the monthly out-of-sample period of 2007:01-2014:12, given an in-sample period of 2003:03-2006:12, using panel data-based predictive frameworks, which controls for heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, persistence and endogeneity. Our results show that while, time series based predictive regression models fail to beat the benchmark of historical average, the panel data models consistently beat the benchmark in a statistically significant fashion. In general, our results highlight the importance of pooling information when trying to forecast excess stock returns based on a news-based measure of domestic EPU, as well as that of the US. (C) 2019 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.