Valuation Risk Revalued∗ Oliver de Groot Alexander W. Richter Nathaniel A. Throckmorton First Draft: July 20, 2018 This Draft: September 8, 2021 ABSTRACT This paper shows the success of valuation risk—time-preference shocks in Epstein-Zin utility—in resolving asset pricing puzzles rests sensitively on the way it is introduced. The specification used in the literature is at odds with several desirable properties of recursive pref- erences because the weights in the time-aggregator do not sum to one. When we revise the specification in a simple asset pricing model the puzzles resurface. However, when estimating a sequence of increasingly rich models, we find valuation risk under the revised specification consistently improves the ability of the models to match asset price and cash-flow dynamics. Keywords: Recursive Utility; Asset Pricing; Equity Premium Puzzle; Risk-Free Rate Puzzle JEL Classifications: C15; D81; G12 ∗de Groot, University of Liverpool Management School & CEPR, Chatham Street, Liverpool, L69 7ZH, UK (
[email protected]); Richter, Research Department, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2200 N. Pearl Street, Dallas, TX 75201 (
[email protected]); Throckmorton, Department of Economics, William & Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187 (
[email protected]). We thank Victor Xi Luo for sharing the code to “Valuation Risk and Asset Pricing” and Winston Dou for discussing our paper at the 2019 NBER EFSF meeting. We also thank Martin An- dreasen, Jaroslav Borovicka, Alex Chudik, Marc Giannoni, Ken Judd, Dana Kiku, Evan Koenig, Alex Kostakis, Holger Kraft, Wolfgang Lemke, Hanno Lustig, Walter Pohl, Karl Schmedders, Todd Walker, and Ole Wilms for comments that improved the paper.