Probably not. First, allowing the probabilities attached to the states of the economy to differ from their sample frequencies, the Consumption-CAPM is still rejected by the data and requires a very high level of Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) in order to rationalize the stock market risk premium. This result holds for a variety of data sources and samples - including ones starting as far back as 1890. Second, we elicit the likelihood of observing an Equity Premium Puzzle (EPP) if the data were generated by the rare events probability distribution needed to rationalize the puzzle with a low level of RRA. We find that the historically observed EPP would be very unlikely to arise. Third, we find that the rare events explanation of the EPP significantly worsens the ability of the Consumption-CAPM to explain the cross-section of asset returns. This is due to the fact that, by assigning higher probabilities to bad - economy wide - states in which consumption growth is low and all the assets in the cross-section tend to yield low returns, the rare events hypothesis reduces the cross-sectional dis-persion of consumption risk relative to the cross-sectional variation of average returns.
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Paper provided by Financial Markets Group in its series FMG Discussion Papers with number
dp610.
Cited by: (explanations, 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.)
Emmanuel Farhi & Samuel Paul Fraiberger & Xavier Gabaix & Romain Ranciere & Adrien Verdelhan, 2009.
"Crash Risk in Currency Markets,"
NBER Working Papers
15062, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Other versions:
Farhi, Emmanuel & Fraiberger, Samuel P. & Gabaix, Xavier & Rancière, Romain & Verdelhan, Adrien, 2009.
"Crash Risk in Currency Markets,"
CEPR Discussion Papers
7322, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
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