Associate Professor Doowon Lee

Predictive models of stock returns are often criticized for generating spurious predictability, unstable predictive relationship, and poor out-of-sample forecasting performance. This paper addresses these issues in the context of four major South Asian equity markets. We provide a bias-corrected estimate of the relationship of future stock returns to dividend yield and interest rate. We use a restricted vector autoregressive model, draw statistical inferences from a wild-bootstrap method with superior size and power properties, and allow model parameters to vary over time. Dividend yield is a significant predictor in both in- and out-of-sample (OOS)in two countries, while interest rate exhibits significant predictability in all four markets. Imposing theoretically motivated restrictions on model parameters appears to improve OOS predictability. Finally, time-variation in return predictability is found to be linked to countercyclical risk premium and persistence of the predictor variables.

This article examines the influence of liquidity risk on the U.S. secondary corporate loan market (herein loan market). The authors empirically disentangle the impact of both loan-level liquidity shocks and systematic liquidity risk from default risk. Loans that experience shocks to either liquidity or default risk experience ongoing price declines, complementing evidence presented elsewhere of price momentum in loan markets. The prices of loans with high liquidity risk are significantly discounted when market liquidity is low, consistent with the time-varying funding liquidity constraints of financial intermediaries. In keeping with a close link between high risk debt markets and equity markets, there is evidence that equity market risk is priced in the loan market.