Over the very long term, the real return on an equity portfolio is around 7.5 percent, which is about as high as that on residential real estate. Because the latter fluctuate much less in price, they are the better investment from a risk-return perspective, at least in peacetime.
This is one of the surprising results of a working paper published in December by the American National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The paper has what it takes to provide clarity in many respects through facts where there was previously only speculation, for example about the long-term performance of bonds, stocks and real estate, or whether the real return on capital assets is actually higher than the growth rate in the long term of the real GDP, as Thomas Piketty in his bestseller Le Capital au XXI siècle from 2013 (German 2014 "") No matter how elegant and convincing an economic theory is, if it doesn't fit the numbers, it's no good and has to be thrown into the dustbin of theoretical history.
Die fünf Autoren des Papiers (The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870-2015, NBER Working Paper No. 24112) sind Katharina Knoll von der Bundesbank, Dmitry Kuvshinov und Moritz Schularick von der Uni Bonn sowie Òscar Jordà und Alan M. Taylor von der University of California Davis. (Frei herunterladbare Version)
In the following table, I have summarized the most important results. I have only included the figures that refer to peacetime, i.e. that exclude the years of the two world wars and the immediate post-war period in each case. If you wish, however, you will also find the average values in the paper that cover these periods. I have omitted five smaller Western European countries in order not to make the table too large - but the average values refer to all the countries examined.
Source: https://blog.zeit.de/herdentrieb/2018/01/12/immobilien-sind-besser-als-aktien_10708
