IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1909.13019.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Equity Premium Puzzle or Faulty Economic Modelling?

Author

Listed:
  • Abootaleb Shirvani
  • Stoyan V. Stoyanov
  • Frank J. Fabozzi
  • Svetlozar T. Rachev

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit the equity premium puzzle reported in 1985 by Mehra and Prescott. We show that the large equity premium that they report can be explained by choosing a more appropriate distribution for the return data. We demonstrate that the high-risk aversion value observed by Mehra and Prescott may be attributable to the problem of fitting a proper distribution to the historical returns and partly caused by poorly fitting the tail of the return distribution. We describe a new distribution that better fits the return distribution and when used to describe historical returns can explain the large equity risk premium and thereby explains the puzzle.

Suggested Citation

  • Abootaleb Shirvani & Stoyan V. Stoyanov & Frank J. Fabozzi & Svetlozar T. Rachev, 2019. "Equity Premium Puzzle or Faulty Economic Modelling?," Papers 1909.13019, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2020.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1909.13019
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.13019
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mehra, Rajnish & Prescott, Edward C., 1985. "The equity premium: A puzzle," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 145-161, March.
    2. Samarjit Das & Nityananda Sarkar, 2010. "Is the relative risk aversion parameter constant over time? A multi-country study," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 38(3), pages 605-617, June.
    3. Pindyck, Robert S, 1988. "Risk Aversion and Determinants of Stock Market Behavior," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 70(2), pages 183-190, May.
    4. Shlomo Benartzi & Richard H. Thaler, 1995. "Myopic Loss Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(1), pages 73-92.
    5. Pierre‐André Chiappori & Monica Paiella, 2011. "Relative Risk Aversion Is Constant: Evidence From Panel Data," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(6), pages 1021-1052, December.
    6. Diebold, Francis X & Gunther, Todd A & Tay, Anthony S, 1998. "Evaluating Density Forecasts with Applications to Financial Risk Management," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(4), pages 863-883, November.
    7. French, Kenneth R. & Schwert, G. William & Stambaugh, Robert F., 1987. "Expected stock returns and volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 3-29, September.
    8. Friend, Irwin & Blume, Marshall E, 1975. "The Demand for Risky Assets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 65(5), pages 900-922, December.
    9. Mehra, Rajnish & Prescott, Edward C., 2003. "The equity premium in retrospect," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 14, pages 889-938, Elsevier.
    10. Narayana R. Kocherlakota, 1996. "The Equity Premium: It's Still a Puzzle," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 34(1), pages 42-71, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Spackman, Michael, 2021. "Social discounting and the equity premium," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 111488, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Safoora Zarei & Ali R. Fallahi, 2019. "Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance Pricing Model," Papers 1912.09273, arXiv.org.
    3. Łukowski, Michał & Gemra, Kamil & Maruszewski, Janusz & Śliwiński, Paweł & Zygmanowski, Piotr, 2020. "Equity premium puzzle — Evidence from Poland," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Abootaleb Shirvani & Stoyan V. Stoyanov & Frank J. Fabozzi & Svetlozar T. Rachev, 2021. "Equity premium puzzle or faulty economic modelling?," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 56(4), pages 1329-1342, May.
    2. Jakusch, Sven Thorsten, 2017. "On the applicability of maximum likelihood methods: From experimental to financial data," SAFE Working Paper Series 148, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, revised 2017.
    3. Roelof Salomons, 2008. "A Theoretical And Practical Perspective On The Equity Risk Premium," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(2), pages 299-329, April.
    4. George M. Constantinides, 2002. "Rational Asset Prices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(4), pages 1567-1591, August.
    5. George M. Constantinides, 2006. "Market Organization And The Prices Of Financial Assets," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 74(s1), pages 1-23, September.
    6. Prat, Georges, 2013. "Equity risk premium and time horizon: What do the U.S. secular data say?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 76-88.
    7. Ågren, Martin, 2005. "Myopic Loss Aversion, the Equity Premium Puzzle, and GARCH," Working Paper Series 2005:11, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    8. Grant, Simon & Quiggin, John, 2003. "The Risk Premium for Equity: Implicatiosn for Resource Allocation, Welfare adn Policy," Working Papers 2003-14, Rice University, Department of Economics.
    9. Campbell, John Y., 2003. "Consumption-based asset pricing," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 13, pages 803-887, Elsevier.
    10. Fernandez, Pablo & Aguirreamalloa, Javier & Liechtenstein, Heinrich, 2009. "The equity premium puzzle: High required equity premium, undervaluation and self fulfilling prophecy," IESE Research Papers D/821, IESE Business School.
    11. Francis Larson & John A. List & Robert D. Metcalfe, 2016. "Can Myopic Loss Aversion Explain the Equity Premium Puzzle? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment with Professional Traders," NBER Working Papers 22605, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Sang Byung Seo & Jessica A. Wachter, 2013. "Option Prices in a Model with Stochastic Disaster Risk," NBER Working Papers 19611, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Rajnish Mehra, 2003. "The Equity Premium: Why is it a Puzzle?," NBER Working Papers 9512, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Minh Hai Ngo & Marc Oliver Rieger & Shuonan Yuan, 2018. "The Fundamental Equity Premium and Ambiguity Aversion in an International Context," Risks, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-24, November.
    15. Milos Bozovic, 2015. "Equity Premium in Serbia: A Different Kind of Puzzle?," MIC 2015: Managing Sustainable Growth; Proceedings of the Joint International Conference, Portorož, Slovenia, 28–30 May 2015,, University of Primorska, Faculty of Management Koper.
    16. Haim Levy & Moshe Levy, 2021. "Prospect theory, constant relative risk aversion, and the investment horizon," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(4), pages 1-21, April.
    17. Alain Abou & Georges Prat, 1986. "Ex-ante risk premia in the US stock market: analysing experts' behaviour at the individual level," Post-Print halshs-00172883, HAL.
    18. Munk, Claus, 2015. "Financial Asset Pricing Theory," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198716457.
    19. Gürtler, Marc & Hartmann, Nora, 2004. "The equity premium puzzle and emotional asset pricing," Working Papers FW10V3, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institute of Finance.
    20. Łukowski, Michał & Gemra, Kamil & Maruszewski, Janusz & Śliwiński, Paweł & Zygmanowski, Piotr, 2020. "Equity premium puzzle — Evidence from Poland," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(C).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1909.13019. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.