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...

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...

We present a consumption-based model that explains the equity premium puzzle through two channels. First, because of borrowing constraints, the shareholder cannot completely diversify his income risk and requires a sizable risk premium on stocks. Second, because of limited stock market...

This paper proposes a new tractable approach to solving asset allocation problems in situations with a large number of risky assets which pose problems for standard approaches. Investor preferences are assumed to be defined over moments of the wealth distribution such as its mean, variance, skew...

This paper analyses the role of asset prices in comparison to other factors, in particular exchange rates, as a driver of the US trade balance. It employs a Bayesian structural VAR model that requires imposing only a minimum of economically meaningful sign restrictions. We find that equity...

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...

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...

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...

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...