The equity premium puzzle, identified by Mehra and Prescott, states that, for plausible values of the risk aversion coefficient, the difference of the expected rate of return on the stock market and the riskless rate of interest is too large, given the observed small variance of the growth rate in per capita consumption. The puzzle is resolved in the context of an economy with rational expectations once the time separability of von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences is relaxed to allow for adjacent complementarity in consumption, a property known as habit persistence. Essentially habit persistence drives a wedge between the relative risk aversion of the representative agent and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption.

Empirical difficulties encountered by representative-consumer models are resolved in an economy with heterogeneity in the form of uninsurable, persistent, and heteroscedastic labor income shocks. Given the joint process of arbitrage-free asset prices, dividends, and aggregate income, satisfying a certain joint restriction, it is shown that this process is supported in the equilibrium of an economy with judiciously modeled income heterogeneity. The Euler equations of consumption in a representative-agent economy are replaced by a set of Euler equations that depend not only on the per capita consumption growth but also on the cross-sectional variance of the individual consumers' consumption growth. Constantinides acknowledges support from a gift to the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, by Dimensional Fund Advisors. Duffie acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under grant SES 90-10062 and from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Sonderforschungsbereich 303 as well as the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Forderpreis. We are grateful for comments from John Cochrane,

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