Abstract. For a linear autonomous difference equation with a unique real eigenvalue λ 0 , it is shown that for every solution x the ratio of x and the eigensolution corresponding to λ 0 is Cesàro summable to a limit which can be expressed in terms of the initial data. As a consequence, for most solutions the Lyapunov characteristic exponent is equal to λ 0 . The proof is based on a Tauberian theorem for the Laplace transform.Given r > 0, let C = C([−r, 0], R) denote the Banach space of all continuous functions from [−r, 0] into R equipped with the supremum norm,Consider the linear homogeneous difference equationwhere the difference operator D : C → R is given byand the symbol x t ∈ C is defined by x t (θ) = x(t+θ) for θ ∈ [−r, 0]. Throughout the paper, we assume that the kernel η : [−r, 0] → R is a nonconstant nondecreasing function such that η(0) = 0 and η is continuous from the left at each θ ∈ (−r, 0]. The integral in (2) is a Riemann-Stieltjes integral. With Eq.(1), we associate an initial condition of the formThe monotonicity and left continuity of η at zero imply that Var [s,0] − and hence the difference operator D is atomic at zero (see [6] for a definition). By known existence theorems (see, e.g., [6, Chap. 12]), the initial value problem (1)-(3) has a unique solution on [−r, ∞). We shall write x(t) = x(t, ψ) for the unique solution of (1) and (3).