A widely cited failing of real business cycle models is their inability to account for the cyclical patterns of ?nancial variables. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the return to capital and equity are identical in the neoclassical growth model. This paper constructs a measure of the...

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...

We measure the return to capital directly from the NIPA and BEA data and examine the return implications of the real business cycle model. We construct a quarterly time series of the after-tax return to business capital. Its volatility is considerably smaller than that of S&P 500 returns. The...

An innovation in this paper is to introduce a time-to-build technology for the production of market capital into a model with home production. Our main finding is that the two anomalies that have plagued all household production modelsthe positive correlation between business and household...