“…Then, we compare the predictive power of the sentiment indices to that of economic variables. Following Campbell and Shiller (1988), Welch and Goyal (2008), Goh, Jiang, Tu, and Wang (2013), Frrmmel and Han (2014), and Wang, Liu, Ma, and Diao (2018), among others, we consider the 10 popular economic variables on the Chinese A‐share market, such as log of the dividend‐price ratio ( DP ), earnings‐to‐book equity ratio ( ROE ), log earning‐price ratio ( EP ), book‐to‐market ratio (BM), turnover rate ( TO ), Shibor rate ( Shibor ), weighted‐average interest rate in the national interbank borrowing market ( Bkuim ), inflation rate (Inflation), producer price index ( PPI ), and purchasing managers' index ( PMI ) (see, for example, Welch & Goyal, 2008; Jiang, Tu, Rapach, Strauss, & Zhou, 2011; Zhang, Wei, Ma, & Yi, 2019; Dong, Yue, & Cao, 2020). The results of univariate regressions show that the in‐sample R 2 statistics of the 10 economic variables are all below 3%, and only four of them are greater than 1%.…”