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...

This paper surveys the field of asset pricing. The emphasis is on the interplay between theory and empirical work and on the trade-off between risk and return. Modern research seeks to understand the behavior of the stochastic discount factor (SDF) that prices all assets in the economy. The...

This paper uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period from 1962 to 1997 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly, correlations among individual...

Expectations theories of asset returns may be interpreted as stating either that risk premia are zero, or that they are constant through time. Under the former interpretation, different versions of the expectations theory of the term structure are inconsistent with one another, but I show that...

This paper presents estimates indicating that, for aggregate U.S. stock market data 1871-1986, a long historical average of real earnings is a good predictor of the present value of future real dividends. This is true even when the information contained in stock prices is taken into account. We...