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This paper studies the relation between changes in financial investment opportunities and changes in the macroeconomy. States variables such as the lagged production growth rate, the default premium, the term premium, the short‐term interest rate and the market dividend‐price ratio are shown to be indicators of recent and future economic growth. Further, the market excess return is negatively correlated with recent economic growth and positively correlated with expected future economic growth. These results offer straightforward interpretations of recent evidence on the forecasts of the market excess return by state variable via their forecasts on the macroeconomy.

In an intertemporal economy where both risk (stock beta) and expected return are time varying, the authors derive a linear relation between the unconditional beta and the unconditional return under certain stationarity assumptions about the stochastic process of size‐portfolio betas. The model suggests the use of long time periods to estimate the unconditional portfolio betas. The authors find that, after controlling for the betas thus estimated, a firm‐size proxy, such as the logarithm of the firm size, does not have explanatory power for the averaged returns across the size‐ranked portfolios.

We estimate the parameters of Ross's Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT). Using daily return data during the 1963–78 period, we compare the evidence on the APT and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) as implemented by market indices and find that the APT performs well. The theory is further supported in that estimated expected returns depend on estimated factor loadings, and variables such as own variance and firm size do not contribute additional explanatory power to that of the factor loadings.