This chapter reviews the behavior of financial asset prices in relation to consumption. The chapter lists some important stylized facts that characterize U.S. data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which...

This paper introduces a model-free decomposition of S&P 500 forward market index returns in terms of realized and implied dispersion, downside, and tail risk using option portfolios. The decomposition lends itself by construction to learn about the different sources of risk in the market return,...

This paper studies equilibrium in a pure exchange economy with unobservable Markov switching consumption growth regimes and regime-dependent preferences. Variations in risk attitudes have fundamental effects on the structure of equilibrium. Explicit solutions are provided for the market price of...