We study the pricing of political uncertainty in a general equilibrium model of government policy choice. We find that political uncertainty commands a risk premium whose magnitude is larger in poorer economic conditions. Political uncertainty reduces the value of the implicit put protection...

A single variable describes, day-by-day, what investors think about the state of Brazil's economy: the Brazilian component of the Emerging Market Bond Index, the Embi spread. This spread is the difference between the yield on a dollar-denominated bond issued by the Brazilian government and a...

Standard representative-agent models have difficulty in accounting for the weak correlation between stock returns and measurable fundamentals, such as consumption and output growth. This failing underlies virtually all modern asset-pricing puzzles. The correlation puzzle arises because these...

This paper analyzes the impact of strained government finances on macroeconomic stability and the transmission of fiscal policy. Using a variant of the model by Curdia and Woodford (2009), we study a 'sovereign risk channel' through which sovereign default risk raises funding costs in the...

We derive new estimates of total wealth, the returns on total wealth, and the wealth effect on consumption. We estimate the prices of aggregate risk from bond yields and stock returns using a no-arbitrage model. Using these risk prices, we compute total wealth as the price of a claim to...

Sovereign risk premia in several euro area countries have risen markedly since 2008, driving up credit spreads in the private sector as well. We propose a New Keynesian model of a two-region monetary union that accounts for this "sovereign risk channel." The model is calibrated to the euro area...

We develop a simple overlapping generations model in which the young have a choice in investing in equities and index-linked bonds. Projections of share price uncertainty over a 30-year period show that the risk associated with such a long-term investment predicts an equity premium that matches...

We argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by bondholders on long-term debt. First, we present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By issuing long-term debt, the...

In models with a large number of agents who have constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) preferences, the absence of insurance markets for idiosyncratic labour income risk has no effect on the premium for aggregate risk if the distribution of idiosyncratic risk is independent of aggregate shocks....