Inflation Illusion and Stock Prices

Authors: John Y. Campbell, Tuomo Vuolteenaho - American Economic Review 2004 cited by 478

We empirically decompose the S&P 500's dividend yield into (1) a rational forecast of long-run real dividend growth, (2) the subjectively expected risk premium, and (3) residual mispricing attributed to the market's forecast of dividend growth deviating from the rational forecast. Consistent with the Modigliani-Cohn hypothesis, we find that the level of inflation explains almost 80% of the time-series variation in stock-market mispricing.