High Equity Premium Research Articles

Business Cycles, Regime Shifts, and Return Predictability

AbstractConsistent with the empirical properties of the consumption data, I develop a model in which consumption and dividend growth follow regime-switching dynamics. I show that regime-shift risk is priced in the model. Regime-shift risk exhibits dominant influence on asset prices: It generates a high equity premium and also induces time-varying risk premiums. The model explains major business cycle-dependent asset market phenomena and, in particular, the stronger predictability of stock returns during recessions.

Consumption with earnings, liquidity, and market based models

The market, earnings, and liquidity growth combine to form a proxy for wealth growth, allowing a recursive consumption model with a low risk aversion coefficient, a risk-free rate close to historical, a high equity premium, and a reasonable elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The empirical consumption model does well against major asset pricing puzzles. Tested over 118 years it is not rejected while a forward-looking consumption model using the market alone as a wealth proxy fails. Changing liquidity and earnings forecast consumption and their ‘crashes’ precede consumption declines. We also demonstrate related stock level factors have similar economic magnitude and are significant. These models are consistent to the financial intermediary economic growth literature. Such consistency across approaches adds credence to common earnings and liquidity factors as important risks to investors.

Regime shifts in a long-run risks model of stock and treasury bond markets

PurposeThis paper aims to study the asset pricing implications for stock and bond markets in a long-run risks (LRR) model with regime shifts. This general equilibrium framework can not only generate sign-switching stock-bond correlations and bond risk premium, but also quantitatively reproduce various other salient empirical features in stock and bond markets, including time-varying equity and bond return premia, regime shifts in real and nominal yield curves, the violation of the expectations hypothesis of bond returns.Design/methodology/approachThe researchers study the joint determinants of stock and bond returns in a LRR model framework with regime shifts in consumption and inflation dynamics. In particular, the means, volatilities, and the correlation structure between consumption growth and inflation are regime-dependent.FindingsThe model shows that the term structure of interest rates and stock-bond correlation are intimately related to business cycles, while LRR play a more important role in accounting for high equity premium than do business cycle risks.Originality/valueThis paper studies the joint determinants of stock and bond returns in a Bansal and Yaron (2004) type of LRR framework. This rational expectations general equilibrium framework can (1) jointly match the dynamics of consumption, inflation and cash flow; (2) generate time-varying and sign-switching stock and bond correlations, as well as generating sign-switching bond risk premium; and (3) coherently explain another long list of salient empirical features in stock and bond markets, including time-varying equity and bond return premia, regime shifts in real and nominal yield curves, the violation of the expectations hypothesis of bond returns.

Regime Shifts in a Long-run Risks Model of U.S. Stock and Treasury Bond Markets

I study the joint determinants of stock and bond returns in Bansal and Yaron (2004) long-run risks model framework with regime shifts in consumption and in‡ation dynamics –in particular, the means, volatilities, and the correlation structure between consumption growth and in‡ation are regime-dependent. This general equilibrium framework can (1) generate time-varying and switching signs of stock and bond correlations, as well as switching signs of bond risk premium; (2) quantitatively reproduce various other salient empirical features in stock and bond markets, including time-varying equity and bond return premia, regime shifts in real and nominal yield curve, the violation of expectations hypothesis of bond returns. The model shows that term structure of interest rates and stock-bond correlation are intimately related to business cycles, while long-run risks play a more important role to account for high equity premium than business cycle risks.

Asset pricing with return extrapolation

We present a new model of asset prices in which a representative agent has extrapolative beliefs about stock market returns and Epstein-Zin preferences. The model quantitatively explains facts about asset prices, return expectations, and cash-flow expectations. When the agent’s beliefs about stock market returns are calibrated to survey expectations of investors, the model generates excess volatility and predictability of stock market returns, a high equity premium, a low and stable risk-free rate, and a low correlation between stock market returns and consumption growth. Moreover, the model has implications for expectations about future cash flows that are consistent with empirical findings.

Asset Pricing Based on Micro Consumption

This paper shows that consumption-based asset pricing puzzles arise from using globally concave-shaped consumption utility. We empirically find that asset returns correlate negatively with many individuals’ low-quantile consumption growth. This finding challenges most mainstream models and supports an asset pricing model based on S-shaped consumption utility. This new model explains both the low covariance between consumption growth and stock returns and a high equity premium. Moreover, this model shows that applying globally concave-shaped consumption utility mistakenly leads to a positive correlation between risky returns and stochastic discount factors of many individuals, a root for many pricing anomalies.

Solving the Equity Premium Puzzle by unifying Economics and Finance

The Equity risk-premium and volatility puzzle - is it possible to have a high equity premium and a low risk-free rate with a plausible risk aversion- have received a great deal of attention but beyond this question, the fundamental issues of that puzzle are the followings: what are the economic representations that can provide such results? What are the relevant links between finance and economics? And what should be the consequences for economic decisions makers? The classic ways to model the financial economy with a representative agent placed in a Lucas tree model, i.e. maximizing consumption-based utility, where fruit is equivalent to dividend and consumption, failed to explain a high equity premium and a low risk free rate. Even more, simple changes in reasoning failed to provide a consistent macroeconomic and finance representation that sticks to reality. This paper presents a new eco-financial approach based on three major changes: the definition of Wealth and wealth increment and their utility for any agent instead of consumption, a permanent change of equilibrium theory, a more realistic model in which the agents fear much more crises than ordinary fluctuations. This model borrows two key principles from the model developed in Modigliani and Miller’s seminal papers: firstly an economy with investment opportunities in the market of goods and services and secondly an economy where rational agents always prefer more wealth to less and are indifferent as to whether a given increment to their wealth takes the form of dividend or growth in value .Main changes come from, we generalized this wealth approach to any agent, in a changing of equilibrium world, where crises are much more dreaded than ordinary negative events. We will show that it is a way to solve the equity premium and to make consistent: macro, micro, finance and reality.

The 'Matthew Effect' in Asset Returns: Winners and Losers from Entry

I show that asset prices react asymmetrically to entry risk. As entry increases, competition intensifies, leading to higher aggregate output. However, aggregate price falls affecting low market power firms adversely, with less output and employees, while higher market power firms eventually expand. Since entry risk depends on aggregate conditions, the ensuing endogenous reallocation, also known as the Matthew Effect, gives rise to several empirical phenomena, including the high equity premium and the size effect. Conversely, as entry rates in the US have been declining since the early 80’s, an Anti-Matthew Effect has prevailed in more recent years, establishing a positive relationship between markups and excess returns and weakening size in the data. In fact, an empirical investigation reveals that the majority of small growth low profitability firms exhibit low market power. Finally, a strategy exploiting the Anti-Matthew Effect generates positive - and statistically significant - excess returns of 7.8% per annum.

A Brain-Focused Approach to the Equity Premium Puzzle

Findings from the brain sciences show that rather than assuming that human beings pursue their own self- interests, it is more accurate to say that the human brain does so. This is because the brain must first optimize on its own internal resources before seeking to optimize on the resources available in the external world. We show that this modest change is perspective, from self-interested human beings to self-interested brains can resolve the key macro-finance puzzles of broad interest: high equity premium which is countercyclical with a low and stable risk-free rate.

Searching for the Equity Premium

Labor market frictions are crucial for the equity premium in production economies. A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with recursive utility, search frictions, and capital accumulation yields a high equity premium of 4.26% per annum, a stock market volatility of 11.8%, and a low average interest rate of 1.59%, while simultaneously retaining plausible business cycle dynamics. The equity premium and stock market volatility are strongly countercyclical, while the interest rate and consumption growth are largely unpredictable. Because of wage inertia, dividends are procyclical despite consumption smoothing via capital investment. The welfare cost of business cycles is huge, 29%. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

A consumption-based asset pricing model with disappointment aversion and uncertainty shocks

We study a consumption-based asset pricing model with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ uncertainties. Good and bad uncertainties are characterized by two gamma distributions with time-varying shape parameters and they respectively represent potentially fat-tailed, skewed positive and negative innovations to consumption growth. The representative agent has generalized disappointment aversion preferences. We show that disappointment aversion is important for generating a low risk-free rate and high equity premium, and additionally, while the influence of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) on equity premium is negligible, the EIS is important for delivering reasonable implications on the market prices of the two uncertainty components.

Regret-based capital asset pricing model

This study examines the influence of regret aversion on asset pricing by proposing a regret-based capital asset pricing model in which individuals maximize the expected returns from chosen portfolios of assets while minimizing anticipated regrets. In equilibrium, a closed-form pricing formula is derived, whereby a risky asset's excess return is proportional to its “regret beta” that measures the exposure to investors’ emotions. The market as a whole pays investors a positive “regret premium” as compensation for regret aversion. As such, this study proposes a conceptual framework to understand the aggregate effects of regret. The model indicates that employing a regret-related beta can help explain cross-sectional returns. It also implies that regret aversion is a possible reason for the flat security market line and high equity premium.

Consumption with Earnings, Liquidity, and Market Based Models

Financial intermediary economic growth theory with its empirical findings, along with stock-level factors; both ideally relate to a consumption asset pricing model. Changing liquidity and earnings combined with the market proxy wealth growth, allowing a recursive consumption model with a low risk aversion coefficient, a risk-free rate close to historical, a high equity premium, and a reasonable elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The empirical consumption model does well against major asset pricing puzzles. Tested over 118 years it is not rejected while a forward-looking consumption model using the market alone as a wealth proxy fails. Changing liquidity and earnings forecast consumption and their ‘crashes’ precede consumption declines. This consistency across approaches adds credence to common risk factors as important risks to investors.

Investor's Selective Deviation on High Equity Premium: An Empirical Study of the Listed Companies in Bohai Coast Region

ABSTRACT Liu X.-F.; Li W.-R., 2019. Investor's selective deviation on high equity premium: An empirical study of the listed companies in Bohai coast region. In: Gong, D.; Zhu H., and Liu R. (eds.),...

Banking System Adjustment to Regulatory Capital Requirements

The main objective of this paper is to explore the adjustment of bank business activities to new regulatory capital requests using panel data analyses of the European banking system. The research hypothesis assumes that the increase in capital requirements affects the banks’ balance sheet adjustment and bank lending to the non-financial sector. The banks can maintain the higher regulatory capital ratio by increasing the volume of share capital or by decreasing the risk-weighted assets and bank lending activities. The high equity premium upon a new equity issue due to asymmetric information about the bank’s net worth discourages the current shareholder to issue additional capital, which has resulted in bank lending constraints and has increased non-risk bank assets. Banks’ response to new capital requirements can announce a long-term negative impact to real economy and bank depending borrowers. The model of empirical analysis of the banking sector adjustment to new capital requirements will be demonstrated on the sample of publicly listed banking firms in the European Union in the period 2000–2016 using dynamic panel-data estimation with the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) in one-step.

A class of tractable incomplete-market models for studying asset returns and risk exposure

We present a class of tractable incomplete-market models, where agents face both aggregate risk and limited participation in financial markets. Tractability relies on the assumptions of small asset volumes and of a period utility function that is linear beyond a threshold, in line with Fishburn’s (1977) contribution in decision theory. We prove the existence of an equilibrium and derive theoretical results regarding asset prices and consumption choices. This small-trade model is able to reproduce a low safe return and a high equity premium, together with a realistic representation of household exposure to both idiosyncratic and aggregate risks.

Revisiting Asset Pricing with Uncertainty in Future Preferences

We demonstrate that uncertainty about future preferences is of first-order importance for understanding the history of aggregate asset prices. Our analysis shows that simply relaxing the assumption of deterministic aggregate elasticity of intertemporal substitution and relative risk aversion can resolve a large array of aggregate asset pricing puzzles. These puzzles include the high equity premium, low risk-free rate, and the predictability (and nonpredictability) relationships among price-dividend ratios, excess returns, and consumption or dividend growth. Our model also generates time variation of dividend yields, risk premia, excess return volatilities, and Sharpe ratios, as well as an upward-sloping real yield curve.

Asset Pricing with Return Extrapolation

We present a new model of asset prices in which a representative agent has extrapolative beliefs about stock market returns and Epstein-Zin preferences. The model quantitatively explains facts about asset prices, return expectations, and cash-flow expectations. When the agent's beliefs about stock market returns are calibrated to survey expectations of investors, the model generates excess volatility and predictability of stock market returns, a high equity premium, a low and stable risk-free rate, and a low correlation between stock market returns and consumption growth. Moreover, the model has implications for expectations about future cash flows that are consistent with empirical findings.

Informative Starting Points and Asset-Return Puzzles

Decision-makers typically rely on informative starting points that are somewhat incorrect and then attempt to make appropriate adjustments. Such reliance on informative starting points may be an optimal response of a Bayesian decision-maker who faces finite computational resources (Lieder et al 2013). Professional equity-analysts take the same approach when they co-categorize closely related firms in peer-groups and routinely extrapolate the analysis pertaining to a prominent firm to other firms in the same peer-group. We show that if the representative agent behaves like a professional equity analyst, then a unified explanation for 5 asset-market phenomena emerges. The phenomena explained include high and counter-cyclical equity premium, size effect, value premium, and media-coverage effect. A novel prediction of the model is that stocks with less volatile payoffs outperform stocks with more volatile payoffs. Empirical evidence strongly supports this prediction.

Asset Pricing with Housing Booms and Disasters

By extending Cumulant Generating Function-based pricing formulas to a two-good economy (non-housing and housing), we obtain closed-form solutions for asset prices. The presence of housing impacts risk aversion and induces time variation that is priced in the model. Since housing also brings about composition risk, we show that it introduces endogenously a long-run risk component into the consumption bundle dynamics. Estimating the model over the period 1959 -– 2020, we show that rare booms and busts events in housing expenditures is determinant in obtaining moderate housing risk premium and housing excess return volatility, both in line with empirical results. The real interest rate and both the level and volatility of the equity risk premium also fit the data owing to the presence of the COVID period into our sample period.