Value stocks are more exposed to disaster risk than growth stocks. Embedding disasters into an investment-based asset pricing model induces strong nonlinearity in the pricing kernel. Our single-factor model reproduces the failure of the CAPM in explaining the value premium in finite samples in...

In many countries, taxes on businesses are less progressive than labor income taxes. This paper provides a justification for this pattern based on adverse selection that entrepreneurs face in credit markets. Individuals choose between becoming entrepreneurs or workers and differ in their skill...

Although the effects of economic news announcements on asset prices are well established, these relationships are unlikely to be stable. This paper documents the time variation in the responses of yield curves and exchange rates using high frequency data from January 2000 through August 2011....

Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value, reducing the efficiency of trade. This need for opacity...

A fruitful emerging literature reveals that shocks to uncertainty can explain asset returns, business cycles and financial crises. The literature equates uncertainty shocks with changes in the variance of an innovation whose distribution is common knowledge. But how do such shocks arise? This...

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 compares the Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2014) q-factor model and the Fama and French (2014a) five-factor model on both conceptual and empirical grounds. It raises four concerns with the motivation of the five-factor model: The internal rate of return often correlates negatively with the...

An economy in which investors know the true model and its parameters and filter the regime probability from aggregate consumption history has been empirically rejected. Hypothesizing that prices partly reflect investorsʼ belief about the regime, we infer beliefs from prices. The model fits well...

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovements and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing a semi-structural regime-switching model for state variables such as interest rates, inflation, the output gap, and cash flow growth. We...

Using a large panel of firms across the world from 1991-2006, we show that the median foreign firm has lower idiosyncratic risk than a comparable U.S. firm. Country characteristics help explain variation in the level of idiosyncratic risk, but less so than firm characteristics. Idiosyncratic...