The importance of the macroeconomic variables in forecasting stock return variance:A GARCH-MIDAS approach

This paper aims to examine the role of macroeconomic variables in forecasting the return volatility of the US stock market. We apply the GARCH-MIDAS (Mixed Data Sampling) model to examine whether information contained in macroeconomic variables can help to predict shortterm and long-term components of the return variance. We investigate several alternative models and use a large group of economic variables. A principal component analysis is used toincor porate the information contained in different variables. Our results show that including low frequency macroeconomic information into the GARCH-MIDAS model improves the prediction ability of the model, particularly for the long-term variance component. Moreover, the GARCHMIDAS model augmented with the first principal component outperforms all other specifications, indicating that the constructed principal component can be considered as a good proxy of the business cycle.