# Risk and Return models for Equity Markets and Implied Equity Risk Premium

## TL;DR

This paper reviews methods for estimating the equity risk premium, focusing on survey, historical, and implied approaches, and presents empirical estimates using market data to analyze the implied equity risk premium.

## Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of three main approaches to estimate the equity risk premium and offers empirical estimates based on market data for the implied method.

## Key findings

- Implied equity risk premium can be estimated from current market prices.
- Historical premiums vary depending on the period analyzed.
- Survey-based estimates are subjective and less consistent.

## Abstract

Equity risk premium is a central component of every risk and return model in finance and a key input to estimate costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation. An article by Damodaran examines three broad approaches for estimating the equity risk premium. The first is survey based, it consists in asking common investors or big players like pension fund managers what they require as a premium to invest in equity. The second is to look at the premia earned historically by investing in stocks, as opposed to risk-free investments. The third method tries to extrapolate a market-consensus on equity risk premium (Implied Equity Risk Premium) by analysing equity prices on the market today. After having introduced some basic concepts and models, I'll briefly explain the pluses and minuses of the first two methods, and analyse more deeply the third. In the end I'll show the results of my estimation of ERP on real data, using variants of the Implied ERP (third) method.