Investors have too often extrapolated from recent experience. In the 1950s, who but the most rampant optimist would have dreamt that over the next fifty years the real return on equities would be 9% per year? Yet this is what happened in the U.S. stock market. The optimists triumphed. However,...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium predicts aggregate stock market returns. We demonstrate that statistical finite sample biases cannot “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing evidence of the U.S., we show that country...