Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the riskfree rate puzzle and the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are in fact...

Properties of three well-known and frequently applied first-order models for modelling and forecasting volatility in financial series such as stock and exchange rate returns are considered. These are the standard Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH), the Exponential...

We summarize some methods useful in formulating and solving Hansen-Sargent robust control problems, and suggest extensions to discretion and simple rules. Matlab, Octave, and Gauss software is provided. We illustrate these extensions with applications to the term structure of interest rates, the...