The role of the past long-run oil price changes in stock market

This paper examines the ability of the past long-run changes in oil price to predict the stock returns in the U.S. market. We find this long-lag model performs much better than the one-lag model. The past long-run changes in oil price contain useful information about future real stock returns and excess returns over a Treasury bill rate. This variable alone can capture more than 1% variations of next horizon (month) excess returns, and the predictive power are increasingly strong for long-horizon stock return. These findings are robust when considering other popular predictors into the model, these results are also maintained when considering various subsamples. For out-of-sample examination, the results of McCraken’s (2007) Ros2 and Clark and West’s (2007) MSPE-adjusted statistic explore that this variable contains useful information of future stock returns. More interestingly, the past long-run oil price changes also perform strong predictive power on excess returns for non-US countries.