We show that the equal-weighted average stock volatility analyzed by Goyal and Santa-Clara (GS, 2003) forecasts stock returns because of its co-movements with stock market volatility. Moreover, contrary to the positive relation hypothesized by GS and many others, we find that the value-weighted...

Lettau and Ludvigson (2001a) show that the consumption-wealth ratio-the error term from the cointegration relation among consumption, net worth, and labor income-forecasts stock market returns out of sample. In this paper, we reexamine their evidence using real-time data. Consistent with the...

Why are asset prices so much more volatile and so often detached from their fundamentals? Why does the burst of financial bubbles depress the real economy? This paper addresses these questions by constructing an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agent general-equilibrium model with speculative...

Presentation at Bradley University, Peoria, Ill. - Sept. 5, 2001

The extreme volatility of stock market values has been the subject of a large body of literature. Previous research focused on the short run because of a widespread belief that, in the long run, the market reverts to well understood fundamentals. Our work suggests this belief should be...

We estimate a number of multivariate regime switching VAR models on a long monthly data set for eight variables that include excess stock and bond returns, the real T-bill yield, predictors used in the finance literature (default spread and the dividend yield), and three macroeconomic variables...

We find that the value-weighted idiosyncratic stock volatility and aggregate stock market volatility jointly exhibit strong predictive power for excess stock market returns. The stock market risk-return relation is found to be positive, as stipulated by the CAPM; however, idiosyncratic...

Presentation at Bradley University, Peoria, Ill. - Sept. 5, 2001

In the empirical portfolio choice literature it is often invoked that through the choice of predictors that may closely track business cycle conditions and market sentiment, simple Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models could produce optimal strategic portfolio allocations that hedge against the...

There is an ongoing debate about the apparent weak or negative relation between risk (conditional variance) and expected returns in the aggregate stock market. We develop and estimate an empirical model based on the ICAPM that separately identifies the two components of expected returns–the...