Based on the premise that non-trading reflects illiquidity, we hypothesize that managers use stock splits to attract more uninformed trading so that market makers can provide liquidity services at lower costs, which increases investors’ trading propensity and improves liquidity. The improvement allows investors to face reduced liquidity risk and require a lower liquidity premium, which in turn ...

Mehra and Prescott (1985) found the difference between average equity and debt returns puzzling because it was too large to be a premium for bearing nondiversifiable aggregate risk. Here, we re-examine this puzzle, taking into account some factors ignored by Mehra and Prescott–taxes, regulatory constraints, and diversification costs–and focusing on long-term rather than short-term savings instr...

Thomas A. Rietz (1988) proposes that the possibility of rare disasters (such as economic depressions or wars) is a major determinant of asset risk premia. Robert J. Barro (2006) shows that, internationally, disasters have been sufficiently frequent and large enough to make the Rietz proposal viable, and they account for a high equity premium. The Rietz-Barro hypothesis is almost always formulat...

Can models with idiosyncratic risk solve the equity premium puzzle? and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided helpful comments. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.

This study demonstrates that the U.S. equity premium has declined significantly during the last three decades. The study calculates the equity premium using a variation of a formula in the classic Gordon stock valuation model. The calculation includes the bond yield, the stock dividend yield, and the expected dividend growth rate, which in this formulation can change over time. The study calcul...

In an asset-pricing model calibrated to match the standard asset pricing empirical properties –in particular, the time-variation in the equity premium – we calculate the welfare (value) implications of sub-optimal capital budgeting decisions. Specifically, we calculate that an investment policy that ignores the timevariation in the equity premium, such as would occur with a cost of capital foll...

Agents with standard, time-separable preferences do not care about the temporal distribution of risk. This is a strong assumption. For example, it seems plausible that a consumer may …nd persistent shocks to consumption less desirable than uncorrelated ‡uctuations. Such a consumer is said to exhibit temporal risk aversion. This paper examines the implications of temporal risk aversion for asset...

Agents with standard, time-separable preferences do not care about the temporal distribution of risk. This is a strong assumption. For example, it seems plausible that a consumer may …nd persistent shocks to consumption less desirable than uncorrelated ‡uctuations. Such a consumer is said to exhibit temporal risk aversion. This paper examines the implications of temporal risk aversion for asset...

Restrictions that a class of general equilibrium models place upon the average returns of equity and Treasury bills are found to be strongly violated by the U.S. data in the 1889-1978 period. This result is robust to model specification and measurement problems. We conclude that, most likely, an equilibrium model which is not an Arrow-Debreu economy will be the one that Simultaneously rationali...

This study provides new estimates of systematic risk and the cost of equity capital for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device sectors using data for firms with publicly-traded stock on U.S. exchanges during 2001-2005 and 2006-2008. Two frameworks are employed for estimating firms’ risk and the cost of equity capital: (1) the capital asset pricing model, and (2) the Fama-French t...