The equity premium puzzle shows that using standard parameters and setup, the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model’s (CCAPM’s) prediction of the premium associated with systematic risk is out by an order of magnitude. The object of this paper is to consider the implications of each of the broad classes of explanations of the equity premium puzzle for resource allocation, welfare and po...

We demonstrate that in a CAPM economy Walras Law and the Tobin Separation Property characterize market demand on nite sets of prices. Consequently, for any number n there exist CAPM economies which have at least n equilibria and hence have n di erent beta pricing formulas. It is shown that the lower bound on the number of equilibria, n, is robust to pertubations of endowments.

Evidence indicates that people fear change and the unknown. We model this behavior as familiarity bias in which individuals focus on adverse scenarios in evaluating defections from the status quo. The model explains portfolio underdiversification, home and local biases. More importantly, equilibrium stock prices reflect an unfamiliarity premium. In an international setting, our model predicts t...

This paper derives a key monotonicity property common to all dividend signalling models: the greater the rate that dividend income is taxed relative to capital gains income, the greater the value of information revealed by a given dividend, and hence the greater the associated excess return. This monotonicity condition is tested with robust non-parametric techniques. No evidence is found to sup...

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is currently using a Web-based experimentation environment to support laboratory activities in engineering education. The key service for the acceptance of the learning modalities and the appropriation of the environment by the students is a shared electronic notebook called the eJournal. This service is not only used by students to perform th...

We put forward a general equilibrium model that links the cross-section variation of expected returns to …rms’life cycle dynamics. In the model all assets have the same exposure to short-run consumption risks, but di¤er in their exposure to long-run consumption risks (Bansal and Yaron (2004)). An econometrician who uses conditional CAPM regression to predict asset returns will obtain higher for...