The equity risk premium (ERP) remains one of the most hotly contested ideas in finance. The disagreement, in practical and theoretical terms, centres on how best to measure the risk of an investment, how to convert this risk measure into an expected return that compensates the investor for...

Interest rate changes typically affect the value of equities. However, the slow movement of investment capital may delay the transmission of this information from interest rate markets to stocks. Using a century of data from sixty countries, we demonstrate that yield curve shifts predict future...