Simon Grant and John Quiggin argue that taking the equity premium seriously—-the well-known fact that the average annual historical return of stocks is seven times that of government bonds and other debt-—has many implications, the most robust of which is that recessions are extremely costly...

Analysis of the equity premium puzzle has focused on private sector capital markets. The object of this paper is to consider the welfare and policy implications of each of the broad classes of explanations of the equity premium puzzle. As would be expected, the greater the deviation from the...

Excessive volatility of asset prices like that generated in the 'noise trader' model of De Long et al. is one factor that plausibly might contribute to an explanation of the equity premium. We extend the De Long et al. model to allow for privatization of publicly-owned assets and assess the...