Research on the implied cost of capital (ICC) has found that the equity risk premium is approximately 3%, on average, much lower than estimates based on the mean of historical stock market returns. The validity of such ICC estimates, however, faces both theoretical and empirical challenges. The...

Recently much progress has been made in developing optimal portfolio choice models accomodating time-varying opportunity sets, but unless investors are unreasonably risk averse, optimal holdings include unreasonably large equity positions. One reason is that most studies assume investors behave...