We explore the implications of asset price volatility for the management of monetary policy. We show that it is desirable for central banks to focus on underlying inflationary pressures. Asset prices become relevant only to the extent they may signal potential inflationary or deflationary...

We develop a model in which innovations in an economy's growth potential are an important driving force of the business cycle. The framework shares the emphasis of the recent "new shock" literature on revisions of beliefs about the future as a source of fluctuations, but differs by tieing these...

Noise traders are agents whose theoretical existence has been hypothesized as a way of solving certain fundamental problems in Financial Economics. We briefly review the literature on noise traders. The is an entry for The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition (Palgrave Macmillan:...

Shareholders have imperfect ontrol over the decisions of the management of a firm. We integrate a widely accepted version of the separation of ownership and control -- Jensen's (1986) free cash flow theory--into a dynamic equilibrium model and study the effect of imperfect corporate control on...

We attempt to explain the overreaction of asset prices to movements in short-term interest rates, dividends, and asset supplies. The key element of our explanation is a margin constraint that traders face which limits their leverage to a fraction of the value of their assets. Traders may lever...

In a capitalist economy prices serve to equilibrate supply and demand for goods and services, continually changing to reallocate resources to their most efficient uses. However, secondary stock market prices, often viewed as the most 'informationally efficient' prices in the economy, have no...

This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of asset pricing in which profitable informed trading can occur without any "noise" added to the model. It shows that models of profitable informed trading must restrict the portfolio choices of uninformed traders: in particular, they cannot...

In efficient markets the price should reflect the arrival of private information. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is arbitrage. A privately informed trader will engage in costly arbitrage, that is, trade on his knowledge that the price of an asset is different from the fundamental...