Discounting The Equity Premium Puzzle

Abstract

This paper applies recent tests of stochastic dominance of several orders proposed by Linton, Maasoumi and Whang (2003) to reexamine the equity premium puzzle. An advantage of this nonparametric framework is that it provides a means to assess whether the existence of a premium is due to an incorrect choice of either the utility function or the underlying returns distribution. The approach is applied to a range of data sets including the S&P500Equity premium puzzle, stochastic dominance, nonparametric, subsampling.