Aggregate stock return volatility is both persistent and countercyclical. This paper tests whether it is possible to improve volatility forecasts at monthly and quarterly horizons by conditioning on additional macroeconomic variables. I find that several variables related to macroeconomic uncertainty, time-varying expected stock returns, and credit conditions Granger cause volatility. It is more difficult to find evidence that forecasts exploiting macroeconomic variables outperform a univariate benchmark out-of-sample. The most successful approaches involve simple combinations of individual forecasts. Predictive power associated with macroeconomic variables appears to concentrate around the onset of recessions.

We compare the stock return forecasting performance of alternative payout yields. The net payout yield produces more accurate forecasts relative to alternatives, including the traditional dividend yield. This remains true even after excluding several years during the Great Depression when issuance was unusually high. The measure of cash flow used to form the yield matters economically. Long-term investors’ hedging demand for stock is considerably reduced when net payout, rather than dividends, serves as the cash-flow measure. An agent relying on an incorrect payout measure is willing to pay an economically significant “management fee” to switch to the optimal policy.

We study the interaction between firm uncertainty and corporate policies, emphasizing the role of skewness in the distribution of performance shocks reflected in stock returns. Conditional on volatility and other characteristics, firms with more negatively skewed performance shocks adopt more conservative policies, including greater cash holdings, a lower likelihood of dividend payments and increases in payout levels, and less financial leverage. These relationships are significant and robust for asymmetry proxies constructed from stock return innovations, in contrast to results for measures based on accounting performance shocks. This disparity highlights the importance of asymmetries in long-run performance shocks for corporate policy choices.

This paper constructs and analyzes various measures of trading costs in US equity markets covering the period 1926–2015. These measures contain statistically and economically significant predictive signals for stock market returns and real economic activity. We decompose illiquidity proxies into a component capturing aggregate volatility and a residual. The predictive content of these components differs in important ways. Specifically, we find strong evidence that the component of illiquidity uncorrelated with volatility forecasts stock market returns. Both the volatility and residual components of illiquidity contain information regarding future economic activity.