This essay examines what volatility tests tell us about the data and what implications we should derive from them. It argues that volatility tests do not tell us that "prices are too volatile", implying that "markets are inefficient", but rather that "(discounted) returns are forecastable",...

This paper presents a bound on the variance of the price-dividend ratio and a decomposition of the variance of the price-dividend ratio into components that reflect variation in expected future discount rates and variation in expected future dividend growth. Unobserved discount rates needed to...