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The equity premium: A puzzle

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Mehra, Rajnish, Prescott, Edward C.·1985·Journal of Monetary Economics

Abstract

Restrictions that a class of general equilibrium models place upon the average returns of equity and Treasury bills are found to be strongly violated by the U.S. data in the 1889–1978 period. This result is robust to model specification and measurement problems. We conclude that, most likely, an equilibrium model which is not an Arrow-Debreu economy will be the one that simultaneously rationalizes both historically observed large average equity return and the small average risk-free return.

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Metadata

Authors
Mehra, R., & Prescott, E. C.
Venue
Journal of Monetary Economics
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
1985-03
Volume
15
Issue
2
Pages
145-161
ISSN
0304-3932 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2570834760
Cited by
5,535
References
0
FWCI
53.68
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The equity premium: A puzzle. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/0304-3932(85)90061-3
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Mehra, R., & Prescott, E. C. (1985). The equity premium: A puzzle. Journal of Monetary Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3932(85)90061-3

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.