A leading explanation of aggregate stock market behavior suggests that assets are priced as if there were a representative investor whose utility is a power function of the difference between aggregate consumption and a "habit" level, where the habit is some function of lagged and (possibly)...

Real business cycle models have difficulty replicating the volatility of S&P 500 returns. This fact should not be surprising since the RBC theory suggests a measurement of the return of aggregate capital, not stock market returns. We construct a quarterly time series of the after-tax return to...