I explore the equilibrium value implications of economic models that incorporate reactions to a stochastic environment. I propose a dynamic value decomposition (DVD) designed to distinguish components of an underlying economic model that influence values over long horizons from components that...

This paper explores two perspectives on the rational expectations hypothesis. One perspective is that of economic agents in such a model, who form inferences about the future using probabilities implied by the model. The other is that of an econometrician who makes inferences about the...

We must infer what the future situation would be without our interference, and what changes will be wrought by our actions. Fortunately, or unfortunately, none of these processes is infallible, or indeed ever accurate and complete. Knight (1921)

Sparked by the recent "great recession" and the role of financial markets, considerable interest exists among researchers within both the academic community and the public sector in modeling and measuring systemic risk. In this essay I draw on experiences with other measurement agendas to place...

The design and conduct of climate change policy necessarily confronts uncertainty along multiple fronts. We explore the consequences of ambiguity over various sources and configurations of models that impact how economic opportunities could be damaged in the future. We appeal to decision theory...

In conducting empirical investigations of the permanent income model of consumption and the consumption-based intertemporal asset pricing model, various authors have imposed restrictions on the nature of the substitutability of consumption across goods and over time. In this paper we suggest a...

A representative investor does not know which member of a set of well-defined parametric "structured models'' is best. The investor also suspects that all of the structured models are misspecified. These uncertainties about probability distributions of risks give rise to components of...

We present a novel approach to depicting asset pricing dynamics by characterizing shock exposures and prices for alternative investment horizons. We quantify the shock exposures in terms of elasticities that measure the impact of a current shock on future cash-flow growth. The elasticities are...

We create an analytical structure that reveals the long run risk-return relationship for nonlinear continuous time Markov environments. We do so by studying an eigenvalue problem associated with a positive eigenfunction for a conveniently chosen family of valuation operators. This family forms a...