by Mordecai Kurz and Maurizio Motolese A very preliminary draft: February 2, 2010 Summary: Why do risk premia vary over time? We examine this problem theoretically and empirically by studying the effect of market belief on risk premia. Individual belief is taken as a fundamental, primitive, state variable. Market belief which is the distribution of individual beliefs is observable, it is centra...

We estimate and test the conditional version of an International Capital Asset Pricing Model using a parsimonious multivariate GARCH process. Since our approach is fully parametric, we can recover any quantity that is a function of the first two conditional moments. Our findings strongly support a model which includes both market and foreign exchange risk. However, both sources of risk are only...

This paper studies the equity premium implications of a canonical New Keynesian model with investment. We find that the presence of a time-varying marginal cost dampens the expansionary impact of a positive technology shock. With a given fraction of firms standing ready to satisfy demand at predetermined prices, the variations in the marginal utility of consumption attributed to technology shoc...

We examine a class of Brownian based models which produce tractable incomplete equilibria. The models are based on finitely many investors with heterogeneous exponential utilities over intermediate consumption who receive partially unspanned income. The investors can trade continuously on a finite time interval in a money market account as well as a risky security. Besides establishing the exis...

This study presents an intuitive explanation, based on insights of real options theory, for the value size puzzle. Growth firms are not overvalued, but priced for their upward potential. Small growth firms are especially characterized by an asymmetric risk-return relation. Therefore, the value-size premium comprises two parts: a distress premium and a growth discount. Beta underestimates the ri...

We develop an algorithm to compute asset allocations for Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) prospect theory. An application to benchmark data as in Fama and French (1992) shows that the equity premium puzzle is resolved for parameter values similar to those found in the laboratory experiments of Kahneman and Tversky (1979). While previous studies like Benartzi and Thaler (1995), Barberis, Huang, and...

We present an equilibrium model of a moral-hazard economy with one firm and financial markets, where a stock and bonds are traded. We show that it is optimal for the principal to forbid the agent to trade the stock; that the second-best interest rate is lower than the first-best interest rate; and that the second-best equity premium can be higher or lower than the first best equity premium. We ...

We owe thanks to Frans Tempelaar and Luigi Zingales for useful comments. We retain all responsibility for content. Abstract We argue that in an unreliable enforcement regime, transactions tend to become intermediated through institutions or concentrated among agents bound by some form of private enforcement. Provision of funding shifts from risk capital to debt, and from markets to institutions...

The equity premium, return on equity minus return on risk-free asset, is expected to be positive. We consider imposing such positivity constraint in local historical average (LHA) in nonparametric kernel regression framework. It is also extended to the semiparametric single index model when multiple predictors are used. We construct the constrained LHA estimator via an indicator function which ...

The paper develops a theory for equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre-scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium during the 1961-2014 period, and virtually 100% of it during the later period of 1997-2014, where more announcement data are available. We pr...