What determines the technology that a country adopts? While there could be many factors, the efficiency of the country’s financial system may play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive interme-...

"In the presence of infrequent but observable structural breaks, we show that a model in which the representative agent is on a rational learning path concerning the real consumption growth process can generate high equity premia and low risk-free interest rates. In fact, when the model is...

"We show that when in Lucas trees model the process for dividends is described by a lattice tree subject to infrequent but observable structural breaks, in equilibrium recursive rational learning may inflate the equity risk premium and reduce the risk-free interest rate for low levels of risk...

"Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004) and Brennan, Wang, and Xia (2004) recently argue that the value premium co-moves with investment opportunities and thus reflects rational pricing. This paper extends their analysis by showing that the ICAPM interpretation of the value premium also sheds light on...

"This paper studies strategic asset allocation and consumption choice in the presence of regime switching in asset returns. We find evidence that four separate regimes - characterized as crash, slow growth, bull and recovery states - are required to capture the joint distribution of stock and...

"This paper considers a variety of econometric models for the joint distribution of US stock and bond returns in the presence of regime switching dynamics. While simple two- or three-state models capture the univariate dynamics in bond and stock returns, a more complicated four state model with...

"This paper finds strong evidence of time-variations in the joint distribution of returns on a stock market portfolio and portfolios tracking size--and value effects. Mean returns, volatilities and correlations between these equity portfolios are found to be driven by underlying regimes that...