This study examines households’ fertility variations in response to expected permanent shifts in the return to education. Wage premiums measure the return to education because their long-run movements are driven by factors exogenous to the fertility process. The results indicate that high education parents’ fertility responds negatively to changes in the expected return to college and negativel...

The expected market return is a number frequently required for the solution of many investment and corporate tinance problems, but by comparison with other tinancial variables, there has been little research on estimating this expected return. Current practice for estimating the expected market return adds the historical average realized excess market returns to the current observed interest ra...

We propose an unconditional non-parametric approach to the simultaneous estimation of volatility and expected return. By means of a detailed analysis of the returns of the Standard & Poors 500 (S&P 500) composite stock index over the last fifty years we show how theoretical results and methodological recommendations from the statistical theory of non-parametric curve inference allow one to cons...