IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/2251.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Efficient "Myopic" Asset Pricing in General Equilibrium: A Potential Pitfall in Excess Volatility Tests

Author

Listed:
  • Willem H. Buiter

Abstract

Excess volatility tests for financial market efficiency maintain the hypothesis of risk-neutrality. This permits the specification of the benchmark efficient market price as the present discounted value of expected future dividends. By departing from the risk-neutrality assumption in a stripped-down version of Lucas's general equilibrium asset pricing model, I show that asset prices determined in a competitive asset market and efficient by construction can nevertheless violate the variance bounds established under the assumption of risk neutrality. This can occur even without the problems of non-stationarity (including bubbles) and finite samples. Standard excess volatility tests are joint tests of market efficiency and risk neutrality. Failure of an asset price to pass the test may be due to the absence of risk neutrality rather than to market inefficiency.

Suggested Citation

  • Willem H. Buiter, 1987. "Efficient "Myopic" Asset Pricing in General Equilibrium: A Potential Pitfall in Excess Volatility Tests," NBER Working Papers 2251, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2251
    Note: ME
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w2251.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Robert J. Shiller, 2014. "Speculative Asset Prices (Nobel Prize Lecture)," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1936, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    2. Robert J. Shiller, 2014. "Speculative Asset Prices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(6), pages 1486-1517, June.
    3. Laimutė Urbšienė & Andrius Bugajevas & Marekas Pipiras, 2016. "The Impact Of Investment Horizon On The Return And Risk Of Investments In Securities In Lithuania," Organizations and Markets in Emerging Economies, Faculty of Economics, Vilnius University, vol. 7(2).
    4. Enrique Sentana, 1993. "The econometrics of the stock market I: rationality tests," Investigaciones Economicas, Fundación SEPI, vol. 17(3), pages 401-420, September.

    More about this item

    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:2251. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.