Abstract
The purpose of this study is to provide an economic foundation for asset price processes and to derive economically motivated time-series models as alternatives to the empirically motivated time-series models The analysis is based on the fact that asset prices are completely determined by the information process and the pricing kernel The information process may be interpreted as characterizing a representative investor’s expectations while the pricing kernel equals the standardised marginal utility function of the representative investor in such an economy For example, the geometric Brownian motion as a model for the behaviour of asset prices implies that the pricing kernel has constant elasticity and that the information process is also governed by a geometric Brownian motion These relationships were explained in Chaps 2 and 3 In Chap 4 the literature was reviewed in the light of these relationships.