Existing literature continues to be unable to offer a convincing explanation for the volatility of the stochastic discount factor in real world data. Our work provides such an explanation. We do not rely on frictions, market in completeness or transactions costs of any kind. Instead, we modify a...

This paper studies how financial information frictions can generate sentiment-driven fluctuations in asset prices and self-fulfilling business cycles. In our model economy, exuberant financial market sentiments of high output and high demand for capital increase the price of capital, which...

This paper incorporates a time-varying intensity of disasters in the Rietz-Barro hypothesis that risk premia result from the possibility of rare, large disasters. During a disaster, an asset's fundamental value falls by a time-varying amount. This in turn generates time-varying risk premia and...

This paper develops and implements a new test to investigate whether sell-side analysts herd around the consensus when they make stock recommendations. Our empirical results support the herding hypothesis. Stock price reactions following recommendation revisions are stronger when the new...

Credit market freezes in which debt issuance declines dramatically and market liquidity evaporates are typically observed during financial crises. In the financial crisis of 2008-09, the structured credit market froze, issuance of corporate bonds declined, and secondary credit markets became...

Fifty years ago, the Chicago School argued that flexible exchange rates would insulate employment from foreign economic disturbances: there is no need for policy coordination; flexible exchange rates suffice. Twenty five years later, the Bretton Woods system was gone, and the first generation of...

We formalize the Keynesian insight that aggregate demand driven by sentiments can generate output fluctuations under rational expectations. When production decisions must be made under imperfect information about demand, optimal decisions based on sentiments can generate stochastic...

We propose a novel measure of risk perceptions: the price of volatile stocks (PVS_t), defined as the book-to-market ratio of low-volatility stocks minus the book-to-market ratio of high-volatility stocks. PVS_t is high when perceived risk directly measured from surveys and option prices is low....

Using a novel data of institutional investors' bond holdings, we examine a transmission of the crisis of 2007-2008 from the securitized bond market to the corporate bond market via joint ownership of these bonds by investors. We posit that, ceteris paribus, corporate bonds held by investors with...