Numerous studies find S-shaped pricing kernels, which is conflicting with standard theory. In contrast to that, based on a novel GARCH model with structural breaks, I show that the pricing kernel is consistently U-shaped. The results are robust to variations in the methodology and hold for...

This study combines model-free conditional estimators for the risk-neutral and the physical distribution of equity returns to obtain daily measures for the pricing kernel at the monthly time horizon. Despite their time-varying nature, our pricing kernels are non-parametric, forward-looking,...