Based on Chen and Zhao's (2009) criticism of VAR based return decompositions, we explain in detail the various limitations and pitfalls involved in such decompositions. First, we show that Chen and Zhao's interpretation of their excess bond return decomposition is wrong: the residual component...

We study in detail the log-linear return approximation introduced by Campbell and Shiller (1988a). First, we derive an upper bound for the mean approximation error, given stationarity of the log dividendprice ratio. Next, we simulate various rational bubbles which have explosive conditional...