This article takes a critical look at the equity premium puzzle the inability of standard intertemporal economic models to rationalize the statistics that have characterized U.S. financial markets over the past century. A summary of historical returns for the United States and other...

We explore the consequences for asset pricing of admitting a bequest motive into an otherwise standard overlapping generations model where agents trade equity and perpetual debt securities. Prices of securities are seen to be approximately 50% higher in an economy with bequests as compared to an...

We evaluate the properties of mean reversion and mean aversion in asset prices and returns as commonly characterized in the finance literature. The study is undertaken within a class of well-known dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and shows that the mean reversion/aversion...