We present a consumption-based model that explains the equity premium puzzle through two channels. First, because of borrowing constraints, the shareholder cannot completely diversify his income risk and requires a sizable risk premium on stocks. Second, because of limited stock market...

Numerous articles have investigated the distribution of share prices, and find that the yields are leptokurtic. There is still controversy about the amount of leptokurtosis, and hence about the most appropriate distribution to use in modeling returns. This controversy has proven hard to resole,...

Also called: Inflation and stock prices: a long term view

We introduce adaptive learning behavior into a general equilibrium lifecycle economy with capital accumulation. Agents form forecasts of the rate of return to capital assets using least squares autoregressions on past data. We show that, in contrast to the perfect foresight dynamics, the...

In this paper, we use macrovariables advocated by recent authors to make out-of-sample forecast for returns on individual stocks and then sort stocks equally into ten portfolios on this proxy of conditionally expected returns. The average returns increase monotonically from the first decile...

Allen and Karjalainen (1999) used genetic programming to develop optimal ex ante trading rules for the S&P 500 index. They found no evidence that the returns to these rules were higher than buy-and-hold returns but some evidence that the rules had predictive ability. This comment investigates...

Over the period 1927:Q1 to 2005:Q4, the average CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) and stock market variance jointly forecast stock market returns. This result holds up quite well in a number of robustness checks, and we show that the predictive power of the average IV might come from its...

The Fed targeted the federal funds rate during the period 1974-79; they returned to that procedure in the late 1980s and have maintained it since then. For both periods, we find that stock prices reacted significantly to unanticipated changes in the federal funds rate target, but not to...