The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility ("uncertainty"), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

Recently much progress has been made in developing optimal portfolio choice models accomodating time-varying opportunity sets, but unless investors are unreasonably risk averse, optimal holdings include unreasonably large equity positions. One reason is that most studies assume investors behave...

The equity variance risk premium is the expected compensation earned for selling variance risk in equity markets. The variance risk premium is positive and shows moderate persistence. High variance risk premiums coincide with the left tail of the consumption growth distribution shifting down....

We identify the relative importance of changes in the conditional variance of fundamentals (which we call "uncertainty") and changes in risk aversion ("risk" for short) in the determination of the term structure, equity prices and risk premiums. Theoretically, we introduce persistent...

We show how to use conditioning information optimally to construct a sharper unconditional Hansen-Jagannathan (1991) bound. The approach in this paper is different from that of Gallant, Hansen and Tauchen (1990), but both approaches yield the same bound when the conditional moments are known....

Will the stock market provide high returns in the future as it has in the past? The average US stock return in the postwar period has been about 8% above treasury bill rates. But that average is poorly measured: The standard confidence interval extends from 3% to 13%. Furthermore, expected...

It is often useful to price assets and other random payoffs by reference to other observed prices rather than construct full-fledged economic asset pricing models. This approach breaks down if one cannot find a perfect replicating portfolio. We impose weak economic restrictions to derive...

This paper investigates the statistical properties of high frequency nominal exchange rates and forward premiums in the context of a dynamic two-country general equilibrium model. Primary focus is on the persistence, variability, leptokurtosis and conditional heteroskedasticity of exchange rates...

Existing general equilibrium models based on traditional expected utility preferences have been unable to explain the excess return predictability observed in equity markets, bond markets, and foreign exchange markets. In this paper, we abandon the expected-utility hypothesis in favor of...

Feedback from stock prices to cash flows occurs because information revealed by firms' stock prices influences the actions of competitors. We explore the implications of feedback within a noisy rational expectations setting with incumbent publicly traded firms and privately held new entrants. In...