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...

This paper illustrates that evaluating alternate abatement polices that affect the growth path of an economy on the basis of their effects on asset valuation may not be welfare enhancing. We show that the class of abatement polices considered in the integrated assessment literature are robust...

"Restrictions that general equilibrium theory place upon average returns are found to be strongly violated by the U.S. data in the 1889-1978 period. This result is robust to model specification and measurement problems. We conclude that equilibrium models which are not Arrow-Debreu economies are...