Stephen G. Cecchetti, Georgios Karras, Sources of Output Fluctuations During the Interwar Period: Further Evidence on the Causes of the Great Depression, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 80-102

The Euler equations derived from intertemporal asset pricing models, together with the unconditional moments of asset returns, imply a lower bound on the volatility of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. This paper develops and implements statistical tests of these lower bound restrictions. While the availability of short time series of consumption data often undermines the ability of these tests to discriminate among different utility functions, the authors find that the restrictions implied by a number of widely studied financial data sets continue to pose quite a challenge to the current generation of intertemporal asset pricing theories.

ABSTRACT The Euler equations derived from intertemporal asset pricing models, together with the unconditional moments of asset returns, imply a lower bound on the volatility of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. This paper develops and implements statistical tests of these lower bound restrictions. While the availability of short time series of consumption data often undermines the ability of these tests to discriminate among different utility functions, we find that the restrictions implied by a number of widely studied financial data sets continue to pose quite a challenge to the current generation of intertemporal asset pricing theories.