This paper contributes to the literature comparing the relative performance of financial intermediaries and markets by studying an environment in which a trade-off between risk sharing and growth arises endogenously. Financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against a liquidity...

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....

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...

This paper assesses the effects of agency costs and asymmetric information in credit markets. Asymmetric information and agency costs occur whenever lenders delegate control over resources to borrowers, leading to adverse selection, moral hazard and monitoring costs because of the inability to...

We consider the behavior of the price of a continuously stored commodity, for which discounted price is a non-constant martingale, and thus not-predictable. We prove that the discounted price realization is within any given neighborhood of zero, with any given probability less than 1, beyond a...

Survey data frequently requires conversion from qualitative responses to quantitative series. A commonly cited criticism of the use of the survey data is that the conversion procedures incorporate measurement errors which render the series unusable. In this paper, we provide a novel contribution...

In most of the recent macroeconomics literature, the sticky reaction of prices in response to changes in aggregate conditions has been modelled following the highly influential contribution of Calvo (1983). However, this approach has difficulties in accounting for some well-established stylized...