The large spread between equity returns and risk-free rates (the "equity premium puzzle") has been the subject of intense debate. Two main families of models claim to solve this puzzle: habit-formation models and loss-aversion models. The goal of this paper is to assess empirically which of them...

Not necessarily. I provide evidence that advanced countries' equity premium and consumption growth differ significantly from those of emerging countries. I then estimate distinct disaster risk parameters for these two country groups. My Bayesian analysis demonstrates that in some aspects...

Standard consumption-based models typically fail in pricing asset returns. In a famous seminal paper, Mehra and Prescott (1985), using a standard consumption model, prove the presence of a puzzle (i.e. equity premium puzzle). The recent financial literature still has to provide a convincing...

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are in fact pessimistic, but show marked...

The risk premium puzzle is even worse than previously reported if housing is also taken into consideration next to equity. While housing premia are only moderately smaller than equity premia, they are significantly less volatile and the Sharpe ratio of housing is significantly larger. Hence,...

We sort currencies by countries' consumption growth over the past four quarters. Currency portfolios of countries experiencing consumption booms have higher Sharpe ratios than those of countries going through a consumption-based recession. A carry strategy that goes short in countries that are...

In this paper, we construct alternative theoretical models for exchange rates by introducing additional risk factors, based on the volatility of macroeconomic fundamentals. The modified flexible-price monetary model is used to characterize the long-run equilibrium of exchange rates, while the...

Many modern macro finance models imply that excess returns on arbitrary assets are predictable via the price-dividend ratio and the variance risk premium of the aggregate stock market. We propose a simple empirical test for the ability of such a model to explain the cross-section of expected...

This paper investigates in how far monetary policy shocks impact Euro- pean asset markets, conditional on different risk states. It focuses on four different asset classes: equity of industrial firms, equity of banks, high-grade corporate bonds, and high-yielding corporate bonds. We distinguish...

This study compares and contrasts the multiple characterizations of mean reversion in financial time series as regards the restrictions they imply. This is accomplished by translating them into statements about an alternative measure, the "Average Crossing Time" or ACT. We argue that the ACT...