The Relative Importance of Cash Flow News and Discount Rate News at Driving Stock Price Change

Abstract

Which component is the main driver of stock price movement? Using vector-auto-regression-based (VAR) decomposition method, the literature finds that stock price movements are almost entirely derived by discount rate variation (DR) at the aggregate-level. Recently, extracting variations by the VAR system has been criticized. Employing implied cost of capital (ICC) approach with a sample of 809 companies over the period of 2000 to 2015, new findings demonstrate that cash flow variations (CF) are significant at aggregate-level, as well as portfolio-level. This study also finds that CF variation rises when the horizon extends from one-year ahead to fiveyear ahead. Running return decomposition at the portfolio-level shows that there are significant rising CF variations from small/large growth portfolios to small/large value portfolios. The results also show that DR demonstrates a good tracking power of the actual return for the period before 2005, but CF dominates at tracking after this period. Current research contributes to the literature by providing a fundamental explanation for the value premium.