The U.S, stock market entered 2000 with five consecutive years of exceptional gains. The S&P 500 index gained more than 18 percent each of these five years, and its value tripled since 1995. Concern has arisen recently that the stock market may be headed for a downturn because firms' share...

This paper uses the methodology of Hansen and Jaganathan (1991) to derive a lower bound on the correlation between any pair of asset returns under the hypothesis of complete markets. The bound is a simple function of the two assets' Sharpe ratios and the coefficient of variation of a unique...

We present a consumption-based model that explains the equity premium puzzle through two channels. First, because of borrowing constraints, the shareholder cannot completely diversify his income risk and requires a sizable risk premium on stocks. Second, because of limited stock market...

Numerous articles have investigated the distribution of share prices, and find that the yields are leptokurtic. There is still controversy about the amount of leptokurtosis, and hence about the most appropriate distribution to use in modeling returns. This controversy has proven hard to resole,...