Testing for leverage effects in the returns of US equities

The authors thank the participants to the following conferences: CFE 2013 in London, FEBS 2014 hosted by the Surrey University, the IAAE 2014 in London, the EEA-ESEM 2016 in Geneva Switzerland and the Paris Financial Management Conference 2016 in Paris.International audienceThis article questions the empirical usefulness of leverage effects to forecast the dynamics of equity returns. In sample, we consistently find a significant but limited contribution of leverage effects over the past 25 years of S&P 500 returns. From an out-of-sample forecasting perspective and using a variety of different models, we find no statistical or economical value in using leverage effects, provided that an asymmetric and fat-tailed conditional distribution is used. This conclusion holds both at the index level and for 70% of the individual stocks constituents of the equity index