An Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model

Abstract

An intertemporal model for the capital market is deduced from the portfolio selection behavior by an arbitrary number of investors who aot so to maximize the expected utility of lifetime consumption and who can trade continuously in time. Explicit demand functions for assets are derived, and it is shown that, unlike the one-period model, current demands are affected by the possibility of uncertain changes in future investment opportunities. After aggregating demands and requiring market clearing, the equilibrium relationships among expected returns are derived, and contrary to the classical capital asset pricing model, expected returns on risky assets may differ from the riskless rate even when they have no systematic or market risk. ONE OF THE MORE important developments in modern capital market theory is the Sharpe-Lintner-Mossin mean-variance equilibrium model of exchange, commonly called the capital asset pricing model.2 Although the model has been the basis for more than one hundred academic papers and has had significant impact on the non-academic financial community,' it is still subject to theoretical and empirical criticism. Because the model assumes that investors choose their portfolios according to the Markowitz [21] mean-variance criterion, it is subject to all the theoretical objections to this criterion, of which there are many.4 It has also been criticized for the additional assumptions required,5 especially homogeneous expectations and the single-period nature of the model. The proponents of the model who agree with the theoretical objections, but who argue that the capital market operates as if these assumptions were satisfied, are themselves not beyond criticism. While the model predicts that the expected excess return from holding an asset is proportional to the covariance of its return with the market

Cite this

Robert C. Merton (1973). An Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model. Econometrica. https://doi.org/10.2307/1913811

@article{c1973an,
  title  = {An Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model},
  author = {Merton, Robert C.},
  year   = {1973},
  journal = {Econometrica},
  doi    = {10.2307/1913811}
}

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