Fluctuations in the UK Equity Market: What drives stock returns?

Present value parameters from a state-space model are estimated for the UK FT All-Share Index. The estimated parameters are used to construct a time series of expected future returns and expected future values of dividend growth, both of which are found to be time-varying with persistent components. Variations in the price-dividend ratio appear to be driven primarily by the variance in expected returns. A comparison with the findings from a present value-constrained vector autoregression (VAR) model indicates that the latter forecasts future realized returns and dividend growth better than the series constructed using a state-space approach. Furthermore, when the model is estimated for monthly and quarterly data, expected dividend growth is found to be more persistent.