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Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 18 No. 2 1987

Stock returns and the term structure

John Y. Campbell1,2,3

1 National Bureau of Economic Research · 2 Harvard University · 3 Princeton University

open access

Abstract

In monthly U.S. data for 1959–1979 and 1979–1983, the state of the term structure of interest rates predicts excess stock returns, as well as excess returns on bills and bonds. This paper documents this fact and uses it to examine some simple asset pricing models. In 1959–1979, the data strongly reject a single-latent-variable specification of predictable excess returns. There is considerable evidence that conditional variances of excess returns change through time, but the relationship between conditional mean and conditional variance is reliably positive only at the short end of the term structure.

DOI
10.1016/0304-405x(87)90045-6
Volume
18
Issue
2
Pages
373-399
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

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