Working Paper: NBER ID: w20370
Authors: Oliver D. Bunn; Robert J. Shiller
Abstract: We construct a price, dividend, and earnings series for the Industrials sector, the Utilities sector, and the Railroads sector from the beginning of the 1870s until the beginning of the year 2013 from primary sources. To infer about mispricings in the sector markets over more than a century, we investigate the forecasting power of the Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio for these sectors. With regard to the CAPE ratio, which has originally been devised and employed by Campbell and Shiller (1988, 1998, 2001) as well as Shiller (2005), we define a methodological improvement to this ratio to not only be robust to inflationary changes, but also to changes in corporate payout policy. We then update the original evidence from Campbell and Shiller (1998, 2001) of the return predictability of the CAPE ratio for the overall stock market and furthermore extend this evidence to the three forementioned sectors individually. Whereas this part of our analysis focuses on each sector of the US economy in isolation, we subsequently construct an indicator from the CAPE ratio that enables us to perform valuation comparisons across sectors. In addition to establishing the prediction of subsequent return differences based on differences in the CAPE-based valuation indicator, we also suggest a hypothetical, historical, and simple value investment strategy that rotates between the three sectors based on the valuation signals derived from the CAPE-based indicator, generating slightly more than 1:09% annualized, inflation-adjusted excess total return over the market benchmark during a period of nearly 110 years.
Keywords: Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings Ratio; Historic Valuation of Sectors of US Economy; Long-Term Predictability
JEL Codes: E37; G11; G14; G17; N20
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| CAPE ratio (G31) | long-term returns (G12) |
| low CAPE ratio (G31) | higher long-term returns (G12) |
| high CAPE ratio (G31) | lower long-term returns (G12) |
| CAPE ratio (G31) | subsequent returns (I26) |
| historically low CAPE ratios (N22) | higher subsequent returns (G11) |
| CAPE ratio (G31) | returns in industrials (L69) |
| CAPE ratio (G31) | returns in utilities (L97) |
| CAPE ratio (G31) | returns in railroads (L92) |