Descriptive Analysis of Finnish Equity, Bond and Money Markets

This paper gathers together for the first time the longest available historical monthly return series for the Finnish equity, bond, and money markets as well as inflation. The series are investigated in order to analyze the statistical characteristics of the returns investors would have received in these markets. We also survey the literature concerning the history of these markets and review the main developments to facilitate future research on long-term development of the Finnish markets. Using a new total return stock market index for Finland we find, in an approach similar to Mehra and Prescott (2003), the equity premium for Finland 1913-2009 to be 10.14 percent