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Industry Interdependencies And Cross-Industry Return Predictability, David E. Rapach, Jack Strauss, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We use the adaptive LASSO from the statistical learning literature to identify economically connected industries in a general framework that accommodates complex industry interdependencies. Our results show that lagged returns of interdependent industries are significant predictors of individual industry returns, consistent with gradual information diffusion across industries. Using network analysis, we find that industries with the most extensive predictive power are key central nodes in the production network of the U.S. economy. Further linking cross-return predictability to the real economy, lagged employment growth for the interdependent industries predicts individual industry employment growth. We also compute out-of-sample industry return forecasts based …