Are there threshold effects in the stock price – dividend relation ? The case of the US stock market , 1871 – 2004

We use recent developments on threshold autoregressive models that allow deriving endogenously threshold effects to analyse the evolution of the US stock price–dividend relation over the period 1871 to 2004. More specifically, a mean-reverting dynamic behaviour of the stock price–dividend ratio should be expected once such threshold is reached. Our empirical results showed that significant adjustments would occur when, in a particular year, the stock price–dividend ratio had shown a decrease of more than 8.0% between the previous year and the fourth year before, which implies nonlinearities in the dynamic behaviour of the US stock price–dividend relation.