We introduce FDIF, a measure of Fed communication surprise based on the text of FOMC statements. FDIF measures the difference between text-implied and actual values of key market variables. Positive FDIF of countercyclical variables (e.g., credit spreads) is associated with negative...

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 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...

The past half-century has seen major shifts in inflation expectations, how inflation comoves with the business cycle, and how stocks comove with Treasury bonds. Against this backdrop, we review the economic channels and empirical evidence on how inflation is priced in financial markets. Not all...

We treat expenditures that create intangible assets as investments and instead of expensing them, we add them back to earnings when measuring the return on equity of firms while constructing the profitability factor in the Fama and French (2015) five factor model. The profitability factor we...

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...

This paper shows that the price impact of foreign official (FO) purchases or sales of U.S. Treasuries (USTs) is about twice as large as previously reported in the literature once critical sources of endogeneity are addressed. We also show that prevailing estimates of this price impact suffer...

We propose a general simulation-based procedure for estimating quality of approximate policies in heterogeneous-agent equilibrium models, which allows to verify that such approximate solutions describe a near-rational equilibrium. Our procedure endows agents with superior knowledge of the future...

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...