IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/6617.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Junior Can't Borrow: A New Perspective on the Equity Premium Puzzle

Author

Listed:
  • George M. Constantinidies
  • John B. Donaldson
  • Rajnish Mehra

Abstract

Ongoing questions on the historical mean and standard deviation of the return on equities and bonds and on the equilibrium demand for these securities are addressed in the context of a stationary, overlapping-generations economy in which consumers are subject to a borrowing constraint. The key feature captured by the OLG economy is that the bulk of the future income of the young agents is derived from their wages forthcoming in their middle age, while the bulk of the future income of the middle-aged agents is derived from their savings in equity and bonds. The young would like to borrow and invest in equity, but the borrowing constraint prevents them from doing so. The middle-aged choose to hold a diversified portfolio that includes positive holdings of bonds, and this explains the demand for bonds. Without the borrowing constraint, the young borrow and invest in equity, thereby decreasing the mean equity premium and increasing the rate of interest.

Suggested Citation

  • George M. Constantinidies & John B. Donaldson & Rajnish Mehra, 1998. "Junior Can't Borrow: A New Perspective on the Equity Premium Puzzle," NBER Working Papers 6617, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6617
    Note: AP
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w6617.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mehra, Rajnish & Prescott, Edward C., 1988. "The equity risk premium: A solution?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 133-136, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Rieger, Marc Oliver & Wang, Mei, 2012. "Can ambiguity aversion solve the equity premium puzzle? Survey evidence from international data," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 9(2), pages 63-72.
    2. Marc Oliver Rieger & Thorsten Hens & Mei Wang, 2013. "International Evidence on the Equity Premium Puzzle and Time Discounting," Multinational Finance Journal, Multinational Finance Journal, vol. 17(3-4), pages 149-163, September.
    3. Ravi Kashyap, 2016. "Solving the Equity Risk Premium Puzzle and Inching Towards a Theory of Everything," Papers 1604.04872, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2019.
    4. Robert J. Barro, 2006. "Rare Disasters and Asset Markets in the Twentieth Century," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(3), pages 823-866.
    5. Reinhart, Carmen M. & Reinhart, Vincent & Rogoff, Kenneth, 2015. "Dealing with debt," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(S1), pages 43-55.
    6. Lynne Evans & Anamaria Nicolae, 2008. "The Output Effect Of Stopping Inflation When Velocity Is Time Varying," Romanian Economic Business Review, Romanian-American University, vol. 3(2), pages 60-77, June.
    7. Weil, Philippe, 1989. "The equity premium puzzle and the risk-free rate puzzle," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 401-421, November.
    8. Soosung Hwang & Steve Satchell, 2005. "Valuing information using utility functions: how much should we pay for linear factor models?," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(1), pages 1-16.
    9. 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.
    10. Massimiliano De Santis, 2005. "Movements in the Equity Premium: Evidence from a Bayesian Time-Varying VAR," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2005 62, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    11. Aase, Knut K., 2004. "Jump Dynamics: The Equity Premium and the Risk-Free Rate Puzzles," Discussion Papers 2004/12, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science.
    12. Jing Li, 2021. "On Estimating Risk Premium With Flexible Fourier Form," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 41(3), pages 1026-1035.
    13. Ang, Andrew & Chen, Joseph, 2007. "CAPM over the long run: 1926-2001," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 14(1), pages 1-40, January.
    14. 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.
    15. Rubens Penha Cysne, 2005. "Equity-Premium Puzzle: Evidence From Brazilian Data," Anais do XXXIII Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 33rd Brazilian Economics Meeting] 088, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    16. Kashyap, Ravi, 2019. "The perfect marriage and much more: Combining dimension reduction, distance measures and covariance," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 536(C).
    17. Miller, Marcus & Weller, Paul, 2001. "Moral Hazard and the US Stock Market: The Idea of a 'Greenspan Put'," CEPR Discussion Papers 3041, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    18. Tsvetanka Karagyozova, 2007. "Asset Pricing with Heterogeneous Agents, Incomplete Markets and Trading Constraints," Working papers 2007-46, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics, revised Sep 2008.
    19. Rodriguez, Juan Carlos, 2006. "Consumption, the persistence of shocks, and asset price volatility," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(8), pages 1741-1760, November.
    20. Emmanuel Farhi & Xavier Gabaix, "undated". "Rare Disasters and Exchange Rates," Working Paper 71001, Harvard University OpenScholar.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading

    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:nbr:nberwo:6617. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.