We show that the stock market price reaction to monetary policy surprises upon announcements of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is explained mostly by changes in the default-free term structure of yields, not by changes in the equity premium. We reach this conclusion based on a new...

This paper considers new options on Treasury and stock futures than expire each Wednesday and Friday. I examine the volatilities implied by these options as of the night before expiration, and compare the volatilies just before FOMC days and employment report days with the volatilities on other...

Asset prices contain information about the probability distribution of future states and the stochastic discounting of these states. Without additional assumptions, probabilities and stochastic discounting cannot be separately identified. Ross (2013) introduced a set of assumptions that restrict...

We can only estimate the distribution of stock returns but we observe the distribution of risk neutral state prices. Risk neutral state prices are the product of risk aversion - the pricing kernel - and the natural probability distribution. The Recovery Theorem enables us to separate these and...

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 explore the term structures of claims to a variety of cash flows, namely, U.S. government bonds (claims to dollars), foreign government bonds (claims to foreign currency), inflation-adjusted bonds (claims to the price index), and equity (claims to future equity indexes or dividends). The...