Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

The U.S. Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future

Contents:

Author Info

  • J. Bradford DeLong
  • Konstantin Magin
Registered author(s):

    Abstract

    For more than a century, diversified long-horizon investments in America's stock market have consistently received much higher returns than investors in bonds: a return gap averaging 6 percent per year. An enormous amount of creative and ingenious work by a great many economists has gone into seeking explanations for the so-called "equity premium return puzzle," but so far without a fully satisfactory answer. We first review the facts about the equity premium and then discuss a range of explanations that have been proposed. We conclude that the equity premium puzzle has not been solved: it remains a puzzle. And we anticipate that the equity return premium will continue, albeit at a smaller level than in the past - perhaps four percent per year. (The final draft of this paper was written before the recent stock market crash. As of October 2008, we can say that the crash does not fundamentally alter our conclusions and actually strengthens the case for a substantial future equity premium.)

    Download Info

    If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.23.1.193
    Download Restriction: no

    Bibliographic Info

    Article provided by American Economic Association in its journal Journal of Economic Perspectives.

    Volume (Year): 23 (2009)
    Issue (Month): 1 (Winter)
    Pages: 193-208

    as in new window
    Handle: RePEc:aea:jecper:v:23:y:2009:i:1:p:193-208

    Note: DOI: 10.1257/jep.23.1.193
    Contact details of provider:
    Email:
    Web page: http://www.aeaweb.org/jep/
    More information through EDIRC

    Order Information:
    Web: http://www.aeaweb.org/subscribe.html

    Related research

    Keywords:

    Find related papers by JEL classification:

    References

    References listed on IDEAS
    Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
    as in new window
    1. Constantinides,George & Duffie,Darrel, 1992. "Asset pricing with heterogeneous consumers," Discussion Paper Serie A 381, University of Bonn, Germany.
    2. Randolph B. Cohen & Christopher Polk & Tuomo Vuolteenaho, 2005. "Money Illusion in the Stock Market: The Modigliani-Cohn Hypothesis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 120(2), pages 639-668, May.
    3. Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, 2002. "Limited Asset Market Participation and the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution," NBER Working Papers 8896, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Hong, Harrison & Stein, Jeremy, 2007. "Disagreement and the Stock Market," Scholarly Articles 2894690, Harvard University Department of Economics.
    5. Eugene F. Fama & Kenneth R. French, 2002. "The Equity Premium," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(2), pages 637-659, 04.
    6. Christopher Polk & Samuel Thompson & Tuomo Vuolteenaho, 2004. "New Forecasts of the Equity Premium," NBER Working Papers 10406, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Elton, Edwin J & Gruber, Martin J & Blake, Christopher R, 1996. "Survivorship Bias and Mutual Fund Performance," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 9(4), pages 1097-1120.
    8. Rietz, Thomas A., 1988. "The equity risk premium a solution," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 117-131, July.
    9. John Y. Campbell & Tuomo Vuolteenaho, 2004. "Inflation Illusion and Stock Prices," NBER Working Papers 10263, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. John Y. Campbell & Robert J. Shiller, 1989. "The Dividend-Price Ratio and Expectations of Future Dividends and Discount Factors," NBER Working Papers 2100, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. 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.
    12. N. Gregory Mankiw & Stephen P. Zeldes, 1991. "The Consumption of Stockholders and Non-Stockholders," NBER Working Papers 3402, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. G. Constantinides, 1990. "Habit formation: a resolution of the equity premium puzzle," Levine's Working Paper Archive 1397, David K. Levine.
    14. Phillippe Weil, 1997. "The Equity Premium Puzzle and the Risk-Free Rate Puzzle," Levine's Working Paper Archive 1833, David K. Levine.
    15. Thomas E. MaCurdy & John B. Shoven, 1992. "Stocks, Bonds, and Pension Wealth," NBER Chapters, in: Topics in the Economics of Aging, pages 61-78 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. John H. Cochrane, 2006. "The Dog That Did Not Bark: A Defense of Return Predictability," NBER Working Papers 12026, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Samuelson, Paul A, 1969. "Lifetime Portfolio Selection by Dynamic Stochastic Programming," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 51(3), pages 239-46, August.
    18. Olivier J. Blanchard, 1993. "Movements in the Equity Premium," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 24(2), pages 75-138.
    19. Heaton, John & Lucas, Deborah, 1995. "The importance of investor heterogeneity and financial market imperfections for the behavior of asset prices," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 1-32, June.
    20. Rajnish Mehra & Edward C. Prescott, 2003. "The Equity Premium in Retrospect," NBER Working Papers 9525, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    21. Brown, Stephen J & Goetzmann, William N & Ross, Stephen A, 1995. " Survival," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 50(3), pages 853-73, July.
    22. Martin L. Weitzman, 2007. "Subjective Expectations and Asset-Return Puzzles," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(4), pages 1102-1130, September.
    23. Lucas, Robert E, Jr, 1978. "Asset Prices in an Exchange Economy," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 46(6), pages 1429-45, November.
    24. Huggett, Mark, 1993. "The risk-free rate in heterogeneous-agent incomplete-insurance economies," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 17(5-6), pages 953-969.
    25. Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, 2002. "Limited Asset Market Participation and the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 110(4), pages 825-853, August.
    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 in new window

    Cited by:
    1. James J. Heckman & Seong Hyeok Moon & Rodrigo Pinto & Peter A. Savelyev & Adam Yavitz, 2009. "The Rate of Return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program," Working Papers 200936, Geary Institute, University College Dublin.

    Lists

    This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:jecper:v:23:y:2009:i:1:p:193-208

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Jane Voros) or (Michael P. Albert).

    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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

    If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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