Implied Dividends and Equity Returns
This paper studies the option market?s implied dividend as a predictor of future equity market returns. We introduce this variable in the simple total return framework and discuss some complications of using it as a proxy for the expected dividend. We construct some regressions using the price-dividend ratio and the implied dividend growth, and test them on six years worth of data on the EURO STOXX 50-index. The main result is that implied dividend growth exhibits some forecastability over two-year horizons, but that the dataset is too short to draw any definitive conclusions about long-horizon forecastability. We also find that traditional proxies of risk premium (volatility risk premium, credit spreads and interest rate term-spread) improve the explanatory power of implied dividend growth, and that they have very high explanatory power themselves.