Article: Modified ratios and the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio Journal: Global Business and Economics Review (GBER) 2022 Vol.27 No.2 pp.209 - 231 Abstract: The simple dividend-price (dp) and earnings-price (ep) ratios for the US stock market econometrically appear to be non-stationary. The contribution of this paper is to propose and study the use of a modified earnings-price ratio (mep) that is a stationary version of the conventional ep ratio. A second contribution is to study the forecasting performance of the modified earnings-price ratio (mep) and modified dividend-price (mdp) alongside the classical ep and dp but also the well-known cyclically adjusted pe ratio (CAPE). In-sample forecasting suggests that the modified ratios have improved nominal return fit over the simple ones. Out-of-sample (OoS), mep provides improvements over the classical ep for nominal return forecasting but no benefit for real returns. CAPE does not seem to generalise well with OoS except for the very long horizon. From an investing perspective, when using the entire sample to estimate the trend correction, one could obtain 27% OoS gain for the 5-year period from the predictive regression with mdp. Over the 7- and 10-year return horizon, the theoretical OoS performance gain through mdp is 60% and 69%, respectively. Inderscience Publishers - linking academia, business and industry through research

Title: Modified ratios and the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio

Authors: Catherine Georgiou; Ioannis Neokosmidis; Vassilis Polimenis

Addresses: Business Division, Department of Economics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece ' Business Division, Department of Economics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece ' Business Division, Department of Economics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract: The simple dividend-price (dp) and earnings-price (ep) ratios for the US stock market econometrically appear to be non-stationary. The contribution of this paper is to propose and study the use of a modified earnings-price ratio (mep) that is a stationary version of the conventional ep ratio. A second contribution is to study the forecasting performance of the modified earnings-price ratio (mep) and modified dividend-price (mdp) alongside the classical ep and dp but also the well-known cyclically adjusted pe ratio (CAPE). In-sample forecasting suggests that the modified ratios have improved nominal return fit over the simple ones. Out-of-sample (OoS), mep provides improvements over the classical ep for nominal return forecasting but no benefit for real returns. CAPE does not seem to generalise well with OoS except for the very long horizon. From an investing perspective, when using the entire sample to estimate the trend correction, one could obtain 27% OoS gain for the 5-year period from the predictive regression with mdp. Over the 7- and 10-year return horizon, the theoretical OoS performance gain through mdp is 60% and 69%, respectively.

Keywords: price-to-earnings ratio; dividend-price ratio; non-stationary ratios; PE ratio; modified ratios.

DOI: 10.1504/GBER.2022.125037

Global Business and Economics Review, 2022 Vol.27 No.2, pp.209 - 231

Received: 22 Mar 2021
Accepted: 01 Sep 2021
Published online: 23 Aug 2022 *

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Title: Modified ratios and the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio

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