By using a beginning-of-period timing convention for consumption, and by including the Great Depression years in the analysis, we show that on annual data from 1926 to 2009 a standard contemporaneous consumption risk model goes a long way in explaining the size and value premiums in...

Allowing for a richer information structure than usual, we show that rational traders’ calculation with short-term price fluctuations may heavily influence their behaviour even if the interim price is not influenced by non-rational agents i.e. there is no noise trader risk. Instead, traders...

This paper develops a new method for solving both equity premium and risk free rate puzzles based on the standard utility function. The method for solving the equity premium puzzle in accordance with Mehra and Prescott (1985) needs to be simultaneously consistent with the method for solving the...

Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

The standard, representative agent, consumption-based asset pricing theory based on CRRA utility fails to explain the average returns of risky assets. When evaluated on cross-sections of stock returns, the model generates economically large unconditional Euler equation errors. Unlike the equity...

This paper is a review of the recommendations about the equity premium found in the main finance and valuation textbooks. We review several editions of books written by authors such as Brealey and Myers; Copeland, Koller and Murrin (McKinsey); Ross, Westerfield and Jaffe; Bodie, Kane and Marcus;...

This paper is a review of the recommendations about the equity premium found in the main finance and valuation textbooks. We review several editions of books written by authors such as Brealey and Myers; Copeland, Koller and Murrin (McKinsey); Ross, Westerfield and Jaffe; Bodie, Kane and Marcus;...

A growing body of literature suggests limited asset market participation as a plausible explanation of the empirical failure of the standard consumption capital asset pricing model (CCAPM). Correct identification of capital markets investors is, however, often impossible due to imperfection of...

A disturbing feature of the conventional objective function for intertemporal decisions under uncertainty is that the agent's attitudes toward intertemporal substitution and risk aversion are entangled. This paper shows that, in contrast to common perception, the two attitudes can be completely...