The paper investigates the role of the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES ) in determining the equity premium. This is done in an overlapping generations economy populated by agents that live for 2 periods and maximize a Kihlstrom-Mirman expected utility function. The equity premium...

Previous writers have attempted to resolve the equity premium puzzle by employing a utility function that depends on current consumption minus (or relative to) past habit consumption. This paper points out that an individual's current utility may also depend upon how well off in the recent past...

Simulating a realistic-sized equity premium in macroeconomic models has proved a daunting challenge, hence the "equity premium puzzle." "Resolving'' the puzzle requires heavy lifting. Precise choices of particular preferences, shocks, technologies, and hard borrowing constraints can do the...

I propose a consumption-based asset pricing model that jointly explains the high equity premium, the counter-cyclical behaviour of stock returns, the upward sloping term structure of interest rates and the downward sloping term structure of equity. The driving forces behind these results are...

This paper analyzes how the combination of borrowing constraints and idiosyncratic risk affects the equity premium in an overlapping generations economy. I find that introducing a zero-borrowing constraint in an economy without idiosyncratic risk increases the equity premium by 70 percent, which...