Consumer confidence or the business cycle: What matters more for European expected returns?

•Aggregate measures of the European business cycle predict country returns.•Sentiment predicts country returns due to its relation to the business cycle.•Conditioning on the business cycle, sentiment does not predict returns.

Answer: The business cycle.We show that consumer confidence and the output gap both affect excess returns on stocks in many European countries: When the output gap is positive (the economy is doing well), expected returns are low, and when consumer confidence is high, expected returns are also low. Consumer confidence and the output gap are also highly positively correlated. In fact, we find that consumer confidence does not contain independent information (i.e. information over and above that contained by the output gap) about expected returns. Our use of European data allows us to examine both aggregate European and local-country data on consumer confidence and output gaps. We find that even local-country consumer confidence does not contain independent information about expected returns. Our findings have asset pricing implications: We show that the cross-country distribution of expected returns is better captured when using the European output gap as a risk factor.