This paper surveys the field of asset pricing. The emphasis is on the interplay between theory and empirical work, and on the tradeoff between risk and return. Modern research seeks to understand the behavior of the stochastic discount factor (SDF) that prices all assets in the economy. The...

The effect of money stock announcements on the Federal funds rate has been attributed informally to the information conveyed by the announcements about aggregate reserve demand. This "Aggregate Information Hypothesis" explains the effect without reference to Federal Reserve intervention in the...

The permanent income hypothesis implies that people save because they rationally expect their labor income to decline; they save "for a rainy day". It follows that saving should be at least as good a predictor of declines in labor income as any other forecast that can be constructed from publicly...

It is well known that in the postwar period stockreturns have tended to be low when the short term nominal interest rate is high. In this paper I show that more generally the state of the term structure of interest rates predicts stock returns. Risk premia on stocks appear to move closely...

In this paper I analyze a simple "representative agent" exchange model of general equilibrium, and derive closed form solutions for returns on stocks and real and nominal bonds. The model restricts the representative agent's utility function to be time-separable with isoelastic period utility,...

Expectations theories of asset returns may be interpreted as stating either that risk premia are zero, or that they are constant through time. Under the former interpretation, different versions of the expectations theory of the term structure are inconsistent with one another, but I show that...

To estimate the equity premium, it is helpful to use finance theory: not the old-fashioned theory that efficient markets imply a constant equity premium, but theory that restricts the time-series behavior of valuation ratios, and that links the cross-section of stock prices to the level of the...

The welfare benefits of financial markets depend in large part on how effectively households use these markets. The study of household finance is challenging because household behavior is difficult to measure accurately, and because households face constraints that are not captured by textbook...

This paper reviews the behavior of financial asset prices in relation to consumption. The paper lists some important stylized facts that characterize US data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which features...