In a recent Journal of Finance article, Kan and Zhou (1999) find that the 'Stochastic discount factor' methodology using GMM is markedly inferior to traditional maximum likelihood even in a simple test of the static CAPM with i.i.d. normal returns. This result has gained wide attention. However,...

The investment return is defined as the real return that results from marginally increasing investment at date r, and then reaping the extra output and decreasing investment at date t+1 to leave the production plan for other dates unchanged. This paper constructs investment returns from...

The poor performance of consumption-based asset pricing models relative to traditional portfolio-based asset pricing models is one of the great disappointments of the empirical asset pricing literature. We show that the external habit-formation model economy of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) can...

If stocks go up, investors may want to rebalance their portfolios. But investors cannot all rebalance. Expected returns may need to change so that the average investor is still happy to hold the market portfolio despite its changed composition. In this way, simple market clearing can give rise...

This paper presents a bound on the variance of the price-dividend ratio and a decomposition of the variance of the price-dividend ratio into components that reflect variation in expected future discount rates and variation in expected future dividend growth. Unobserved discount rates needed to...

We present a consumption-based model that explains the procyclical variation of stock prices, the long-horizon predictability of excess stock returns, and the countercyclical variation of stock market volatility. Our model has an i.i.d. consumption growth driving process, and adds a slow-moving...