The risk premium on equities and nominal and real long-term debt in the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to empirical measures obtained from the data--an example of the equity and bond "premium puzzles."...

In dynamic equilibrium models, the household's labor margin has dramatic effects on risk aversion, and hence asset prices, even when utility is additively separable between consumption and labor. This paper derives simple, closed-form expressions for risk aversion that take into account the...

The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates has constrained the Federal Reserve's setting of the overnight federal funds rate for over three years running. According to many macroeconomic models, such an extended period of being stuck at the zero bound has important implications for the...

We study the convergence of European bond markets and the anchoring of inflation expectations in the euro area using high-frequency bond yield data for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain as well as smaller euro area countries and a control group comprising the UK, Denmark, and Sweden. We find...

Long-term bond yields in the U.S. steadily rose during the 1960s and 1970s and then retreated over the next two decades. This rise and fall is difficult to explain using only changes in long-term inflation expectations and real interest rates; instead, an additional role for changes in the term...

A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb shocks to asset values with changes in hours worked as well as changes in consumption. This ability to absorb shocks along both margins can greatly alter the household's attitudes toward risk, as shown by Swanson (2012a). The present paper...

We solve for the optimal time-consistent monetary policy in the New Keynesian model with repeated simultaneous play between the monetary authority, households, and firms. Recent work on optimal time-consistent monetary policy has emphasized the existence of multiple Markov perfect equilibria in...