NBER Publications by Larry Epstein

This paper considers a representative agent model of asset prices based on a recursive utility specification. A constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution is assumed but the risk-preference component of utility is restricted only by qualitative, nonparametric regularity conditions. The principal contribution is to determine the exhaustive implications of this semiparametric recursive utility model for the one-step ahead joint probability distribution for consumption growth and asset returns.

This paper integrates models of atemporal risk preference that relax the independence axiom into a recursive intertemporal asset-pricing framework. The resulting models are amenable to empirical analysis using market data and standard Euler equation methods. We are thereby able to provide the first non-laboratory-based evidence regarding the usefulness of several new theories of risk preference for addressing standard problems in dynamic economics. Using both stock and bond returns data, we find that a model incorporating risk preferences that exhibit firstorder risk aversion accounts for significantly more of the mean and autocorrelation properties of the data than models that exhibit only second-order risk aversion. Unlike the latter class of models which require parameter estimates that...