This chapter reviews the behavior of financial asset prices in relation to consumption. The chapter lists some important stylized facts that characterize U.S. data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which...

Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

This Paper introduces state dependent utility into the standard Mehra and Prescott (1985) economy by allowing the representative agent’s coefficient of relative risk aversion to vary with the underlying economy’s growth rate. Existence of equilibrium is proved and its asymptotic properties...

Probably not. First, allowing the probabilities of the states of the economy to differ from their sample frequencies, the Consumption-CAPM is still rejected in both U.S. and international data. Second, the recorded world disasters are too small to rationalize the puzzle unless one assumes that...

The representative agent model (RA) has dominated macroeconomics for the last thirty years. This model does a reasonably good job of explaining the co-movements of consumption, investment, GDP and employment during normal times. But it cannot easily explain movements in asset prices. Two facts...

This paper characterizes the solution to a consumption/savings decision problem in which one of the consumption goods involves transaction costs. It then analyzes how such adjustment costs affect consumers' risk attitudes. Previous studies have suggested that transaction costs, by resulting in...

Bansal and Yaron (2004) demonstrate, by calibration, that the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model (CCAPM) can be rescued by assuming that consumption growth rate follows a stochastic volatility model. They show that the conditional equity premium is a linear function of conditional...

Expected utility functions are limited to second-order (conditional) risk aversion, while non-expected utility functions can exhibit either first-order or second-order (conditional) risk aversion. We extend the concept of orders of conditional risk aversion to orders of conditional dependent...