TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lustig,Hanno
AU  - Nieuwerburgh,Stijn Van
AU  - Verdelhan,Adrien
TI  - The Wealth-Consumption Ratio
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13896
PY  - 2008
Y2  - March 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13896
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13896.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Hanno Lustig
UCLA Anderson School of Management
110 Westwood Plaza, Suite C413
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481
Tel: 310/825-1011
Fax: 310/825-9528
E-Mail: hlustig@anderson.ucla.edu

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh
Stern School of Business
New York University
44 W 4th Street, Suite 9-120
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 646/284-4141
Fax: 646/284-4141
E-Mail: svnieuwe@stern.nyu.edu

Adrien Verdelhan
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-621
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/253-5123
E-Mail: adrienv@mit.edu
AB  - We set up an exponentially affine stochastic discount factor model for bond yields and stock returns in order to estimate the prices of aggregate risk. We use the estimated risk prices to compute the no-arbitrage price of a claim to aggregate consumption. The price-dividend ratio of this claim is the wealth-consumption ratio. Our estimates indicate that total wealth is much safer than stock market wealth. The consumption risk premium is only 2.2 percent, substantially below the equity risk premium of 6.9 percent. As a result, the average US household has more wealth than one might think; most of it is human wealth. A large fraction of the variation in total wealth can be traced back to changes in long-term real interest rates. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that events in bond markets, not stock markets, matter most for understanding fluctuations in total wealth.
ER  -