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We show that the net corporate payout yield predicts both the stock market index and house prices and that the log home rent-price ratio predicts both house prices and labor income growth. We incorporate the predictability in a rich life-cycle model of household decisions involving consumption of both perishable goods and housing services, stochastic and unspanned labor income, stochastic house prices, home renting and owning, stock investments, and portfolio constraints. We find that households can significantly improve their welfare by optimally conditioning decisions on the predictors. For a modestly risk-averse agent with a 35-year working period and a 15-year retirement period, the present value of the higher average life-time consumption amounts to roughly $179,000 (assuming both an initial wealth and an initial annual income of $20,000), and the certainty equivalent gain is around 5.5% of total wealth (financial wealth plus human capital). Furthermore, every cohort of agents in our model would have benefited from applying predictor-conditional strategies along the realized time series over our 1960-2010 data period.
It has been documented that vertical customer-supplier links between industries are the basis for strong cross-sectional stock return predictability (Menzly and Ozbas (2010)). We show that robust predictability also arises from horizontal links between industries, i.e., from the fact that industries are competitors or offer products, which are substitutes for each other. These horizontally linked industries exhibit positively correlated fundamentals. The signal derived from this type of connectedness is the basis for significant alpha in sorted portfolio strategies, and informed investors take the related information into account when they form their portfolios. We thus provide evidence of return predictability based on a new type of economic links between industries not captured in previous studies.