This paper studies household beliefs during the recent US housing boom. The first part presents evidence from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. To characterize the heterogeneity in households' views about housing and the economy, we perform a cluster analysis on survey responses at different...

This paper considers how the role of inflation as a leading business-cycle indicator affects the pricing of nominal bonds. We examine a representative agent asset pricing model with recursive utility preferences and exogenous consumption growth and inflation. We solve for yields under various...

This paper considers a consumption-based asset pricing model where housing is explicitly modeled both as an asset and as a consumption good. Nonseparable preferences describe households' concern with composition risk, that is, fluctuations in the relative share of housing in their consumption...

This paper considers asset pricing in a general equilibrium model in which some, but not all, agents suffer from inflation illusion. Illusionary investors mistake changes in nominal interest rates for changes in real rates, while smart investors understand the Fisher equation. The presence of...

This paper uses an assignment model to understand the cross section of house prices within a metro area. Movers' demand for housing is derived from a lifecycle problem with credit market frictions. Equilibrium house prices adjust to assign houses that differ by quality to movers who differ by...

This paper studies housing markets with multiple segments searched by heterogeneous clienteles. We document market and search activity for the San Francisco Bay Area. Variation within narrow geographic areas is large and differs significantly from variation across those areas. In particular,...

This paper studies time variation in expected excess bond returns. We run regressions of annual excess returns on forward rates. We find that a single factor predicts 1-year excess returns on 1-5 year maturity bonds with an R2 up to 43%. The single factor is a tent-shaped linear function of...

From a macroeconomic perspective, the short-term interest rate is a policy instrument under the direct control of the central bank. From a finance perspective, long rates are risk-adjusted averages of expected future short rates. Thus, as illustrated by much recent research, a joint...

Corporate cash flows are highly volatile and strongly procyclical. We examine the asset-pricing implications of the sensitivity of corporate cash flows to economic shocks within a continuous-time model in which dividends are a stochastic fraction of aggregate consumption. We provide closed-form...

This paper develops an arbitrage-free time-series model of yields in continuous time that incorporates central bank policy. Policy-related events, such as FOMC meetings and releases of macroeconomic news the Fed cares about, are modeled as jumps. The model introduces a class of linear-quadratic...