This paper assesses the quantitative impact of ambiguity on the historically observed equity premium. We consider a Lucas-tree pure–exchange economy with a single agent where we introduce two key non- standard assumptions. First, the agent's beliefs about the dividend/consumption process is...

In standard models wages are too volatile and returns too smooth. We make wages sticky through infrequent resetting, resulting in both (i) smoother wages and (ii) volatile returns. Furthermore, the model produces other puzzling features of financial data: (iii) high Sharpe Ratios, (iv) low and...

We analyze the history of the equity risk premium from surveys of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) conducted every quarter from June 2000 to March 2012. The risk premium is the expected 10-year S&P 500 return relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield. While the risk premium sharply...

We analyze the history of the equity risk premium from surveys of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) conducted every quarter from June 2000 to December 2012. The risk premium is the expected 10-year S&P 500 return relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield. While the risk premium sharply...

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rates of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete-markets case, we use consumption data for the 50 US states. We find that the rate of risk aversion under the...

The equity premium puzzle holds that the coefficient of relative risk aversion estimated from the consumption based CAPM under power utility is excessively high. Moreover, estimates in the literature vary considerably across countries. We gauge the uncertainty pertaining to the country risk...

We show analytically under quite general conditions that time-varying implied rates of return based on analysts' earnings forecasts are only a downward biased estimator for future expected one-period returns and therefore not suited for computing market risk premia in order to resolve the equity...

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are in fact pessimistic, but show marked...

Correlations of monthly, quarterly and annual consumption growth rates, calculated from novel weekly Gallup consumption data, with the equity premium are high – 13%, 44% and 54% at monthly, quarterly and yearly frequency. The power utility consumption CAPM prices the sample average annual...

The large spread between equity returns and risk-free rates (the "equity premium puzzle") has been the subject of intense debate. Two main families of models claim to solve this puzzle: habit-formation models and loss-aversion models. The goal of this paper is to assess empirically which of them...