This essay reviews the family of models that seek to provide aggregate risk based explanations for the empirically observed equity premium. Theories based on non-expected utility preference structures, limited financial market participation, model uncertainty and the small probability of...

We investigate whether the set of Kreps and Porteus (1978) preferences include classes of preferences that are stationary, monotonic and well-ordered in terms of risk aversion. We prove that the class of preferences introduced by Hansen and Sargent (1995) in their robustness analysis is the only...