A key criticism of the existing empirical literature on the risk-return relation relates to the relatively small amount of conditioning information used to model the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock market returns. To the extent that financial market participants have...

Typical value-at-risk (VAR) calculations involve the probabilities of extreme dollar losses, based on the statistical distributions of market prices. Such quantities do not account for the fact that the same dollar loss can have two very different economic valuations, depending on business...

This paper examines the economics of investing the central trust fund of Social Security in private securities. We note that switching from a policy of having the trust fund invest solely in special issue Treasury bonds to one where some of the portfolio holds common stocks amounts to an asset...

We analyze an environment where the uncertainty in the equity market return and its volatility are both stochastic, and may be potentially disconnected. We solve a representative investor's optimal asset allocation and derive the resulting conditional equity premium and risk-free rate in...

This paper considers a world in which pension funds may default, the cost of the associated risk of default is not borne fully by the sponsoring corporation, and there are differential tax effects. The focus is on ways in which the wealth of the shareholders of a corporation sponsoring a pension...

This paper reconsiders the effects of taxation on risky assets, recognizing the importance of variations in asset prices. We show that earlier analyses which assumed that depreciation rates are constant and that the future price of capital goods is known with certainty are very misleading, as...

This paper explores the taxation of risky assets, both from the theoretical perspective of optimal taxation and from the practical one of measuring "the" tax rate on an asset when, as under existing practice, its stochastic returns are subject to differential tax treatment across states of...

The consumption beta theorem of Breeden makes the expected return on any asset a function only of its covariance with changes in aggregate consumption. It is shown that the theorem is more robust than was indicated by Breeden. The theorem obtains even if one deletes Breeden's assumptions that...

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. To create our hedge target, we extract innovations from climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of high-dimensional data on newspaper coverage of climate change. We then use a mimicking...

We study the pricing of uncertainty shocks using a wide-ranging set of options that reveal premia for macroeconomic risks. Portfolios hedging macro uncertainty have historically earned zero or even significantly positive returns, while those exposed to the realization of large shocks have earned...