In this paper, we examine how learning about disaster risk affects asset pricing in an endowment economy. We extend the literature on rare disasters by allowing for two sources of uncertainty: (1) the lack of historical data results in unknown parameters for the disaster process, and (2) the...

In this paper, we extract common factors from a cross-section of U.S. macro-variables and Treasury zero-coupon yields. We find that two macroeconomic factors have an important predictive content for government bond yields and excess returns. These factors are not spanned by the cross-section of...

Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2013, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t-2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t through t+2. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. That is, when our sentiment...

Using only daily data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety (FTS) episodes for 23 countries. On average, FTS days comprise less than 3% of the sample, and bond returns exceed equity returns by 2.5 to 4%. The majority of FTS events are country-specific not...

Solutions to the equity premium puzzle should inform us about the cross-section of stock returns. An external habit model with heterogeneous firms reproduces numerous stylized facts about both the equity premium and the value premium. The equity premium is large, time-varying, and linked with...

The 2007-2009 recession is characterized by: a large drop in employment, an unprecedented decline in firm entry, and a slow recovery. Using confidential firm-level data, I show that financial constraints reduced employment growth in small relative to large firms by 4.8 to 10.5 percentage points....

In the mid-2000s, federal bank regulatory agencies became alarmed by steadily increasing concentrations of commercial real estate (CRE) loans at many banks, particularly loans used to finance construction and land development (CLD). In January 2006, they issued guidance that required banks with...

This study analyzes the reaction of the U.S. Treasury bond market to innovations in macroeconomic fundamentals. We identify these innovations with macroeconomic news, defined as differences between the actual releases and their market expectations. We show that macroeconomic news explain about...

I develop a macroeconomic model with a financial sector, in which banks can finance risky projects (loans) and can affect their quality by exerting a costly screening effort. Informational frictions regarding the observability of loan characteristics limit the amount of external funds that banks...

Firms with limited internal liquidity significantly increased prices in 2008, while their liquidity unconstrained counterparts slashed prices. Differences in the firms' price-setting behavior were concentrated in sectors likely characterized by customer markets. We develop a model, in which...