Duration and the prices of common stocks

In finance, the term 'duration' means the effective length of a financial obligation which is discharged in installments. This concept has a number of applications in finance like calculating the change in the price of bonds due to the change in interest rates, immunizing the value of bonds, etc. Common stocks are also financial obligations and are considered to have durations. For bonds and similar strong contractual obligations, duration and its applications are clear cut and are used widely. For common stocks duration evaluation is difficult and its practical applications hardly exist. Moreover, there are no publications of numerical results where duration was applied to common stocks. These facts make it doubtful whether duration can be applied to common stocks. The results of the empirical research here, with numerical results, make it doubtful that duration can be applied to common stocks or to explain price fluctuations of common stocks.