There is a paucity of facts about the effects of the recent military "Surge" on conditions in Iraq and whether it is paving the way for a stable Iraq. Selective, anecdotal and incomplete analyses abound. Policy makers and defense planners must decide which measures of success or failure are most...

The last 20 years have been marked by a sharp rise in international demand for U.S. reserve assets, or safe stores-of-value. What are the welfare consequences to U.S. households of these trends, or of a reversal? In a lifecycle model with aggregate and idiosyncratic risks, the young and oldest...

We develop a new framework to study the implementation of monetary policy through the banking system. Banks finance illiquid loans by issuing deposits. Deposit transfers across banks must be settled using central bank reserves. Transfers are random and therefore create liquidity risk, which in...

According to the dynamic version of the Gordon growth model, the long-run expected return on stocks, stock yield, is the sum of the dividend yield on stocks plus some weighted average of expected future growth rates in dividends. We construct a measure of stock yield based on sell-side analysts'...

This paper makes indirect inference about the time-variation in expected stock returns by comparing unconditional sample variances to estimates of expected conditional variances. The evidence reveals more predictability as more information is used, and no evidence that predictability has...

The hypothesis that financial markets punish traders who make relatively inaccurate forecasts and eventually eliminate the effect of their beliefs on prices is of fundamental importance to the standard modeling paradigm in asset pricing. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for...

While the traditional view of financial innovation emphasizes the risk sharing role of new financial assets, belief disagreements about these assets naturally lead to speculation, which represents a powerful economic force in the opposite direction. This paper investigates the effect of...

A firm's termination generates bankruptcy costs. This may create incentives for a firm's owner to bail out a firm in bankruptcy and to curb the firm's risk taking outside bankruptcy. We analyze the role of such implicit guarantees in the context of financial institutions that sponsor money...

This paper uses micro-level data on mutual funds from different financial centers investing in equity and bonds to study how investors and managers behave and transmit shocks across countries. The paper finds that the volatility of mutual fund investments is driven quantitatively by both the...

A key result of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that the market portfolio---the portfolio of all assets in which each asset's weight is proportional to its total market capitalization---lies on the mean-variance efficient frontier, the set of portfolios having mean-variance...