This paper examines whether permanent earnings growth, crucial to stock valuation, increased during the last decade as suggested by proponents of the 'New Economy.' Using S\&P 500 earnings for 1951-2000, we do not find strong evidence of either a one-time structural break or gradual change....

Which pricing kernel restrictions are needed to make low dimensional Markov models consistent with given sets of predictions on aggregate stock-market fluctuations ? This paper develops theoretical test conditions addressing this and related reverse engineering issues arising within a fairly...

It is known that stock returns are affected by monetary policy. This paper theoretically and empirically investigates whether asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public causes the relation between stock returns and monetary policy actions. The paper concludes that...

We study how heterogeneous beliefs affect returns and examine whether heterogeneous beliefs are a priced factor in traditional asset pricing models. To accomplish this task, we suggest new empirical measures based on the disagreement among analysts about expected (short-term and long-term)...

Most investors purchase securities knowing they will resell those securities in the future. Uncertainty about the preferences of future trading counter-parties causes randomness in future resale prices that we call liquidity risk. It is natural to suppose that investors are asymmetrically...

``Limits of Arbitrage" theories require that the marginal investor in a particular asset market be a specialized arbitrageur. Then the constraints faced by this arbitrageur (i.e. capital constraints) feed through into asset prices. We examine the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market in this...

This paper examines the long-run dynamics and the cyclical structure of the US stock market using fractional integration techniques. We implement a version of the tests of Robinson (1994a), which enables one to consider unit (or fractional) roots both at the zero (long-run) and at the cyclical...

Promising emerging equity markets often witness investment herds and frenzies, accompanied by an abundance of media coverage. Complementarity in information acquisition can explain these anomalies. Because information has a high fixed cost of production, its equilibrium price is low when...

This paper examines the effects that capital inflows have on the financial system in a Diamond-Dybvig environment. Here, an adverse-selection problem arises where short-term capital has the incentive to enter the domestic banking system while long-term capital chooses to stay out. Then,...

This paper investigates whether the presence of financial frictions can help explain the differences in the variability of output and inflation between the Pre- and the Post-Volcker periods. I use a limited participation model with credit market imperfections, in which financial frictions may...