Conventional tests of present-value models tend to over-reject the null of no predictability, concluding that price-dividend ratio variations are due to both cash flow and discount rate shocks. We propose a nonparametric Monte Carlo testing method, which does not rely on distributional assumptions to aggregate the information from the time series of price-dividend ratios and dividend growth. We find evidence of return predictability, but no apparent evidence of dividend growth predictability, thus reconciling the diverging conclusions in the literature. Our findings are robust to the specification of the predictive information set and account for the intrinsic probability of detecting predictive relations by chance alone.
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