Why did the real interest rate decline and the equity premium increase over the last 30 years? This paper assesses the role of uncertainty and credit market frictions. We quantify a model with heterogeneous households using data on asset prices and macro aggregates, as well as on households'...

We introduce and analyze a new market design for trading financial assets. The design allows traders to directly trade any user-defined linear combination of assets. Orders for such portfolios are expressed as downward-sloping piecewise-linear demand curves with quantities as flows...

The extant literature predicts market returns with "simple" models that use only a few parameters. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we theoretically prove that simple models severely understate return predictability compared to "complex" models in which the number of parameters exceeds the...

We survey the nascent literature on machine learning in the study of financial markets. We highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research. This survey is designed for both financial economists interested in grasping...

We propose a statistical model of differences in beliefs in which heterogeneous investors are represented as different machine learning model specifications. Each investor forms return forecasts from their own specific model using data inputs that are available to all investors. We measure...

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...

The abnormal return associated with a stock being added to the S&P 500 has fallen from an average of 3.4% in the 1980s and 7.6% in the 1990s to 0.8% over the past decade. This has occurred despite a significant increase in the percentage of stock market assets linked to the index. A similar...

Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

We find that variation in expected U.S. productivity explains over half of U.S. dollar/G7 exchange rate fluctuations. Both correctly-anticipated changes in productivity and expectational noise, which influences the expectation of productivity but not its eventual realization, have large effects....

We study hand-collected data on firms' perceptions of their cost of capital. Firms with higher perceived cost of capital earn higher returns on invested capital and invest less, suggesting that the perceived cost of capital shapes long-run capital allocation. The perceived cost of capital is...