Three mutually uncorrelated economic shocks that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. We use a model to show that they are the observable empirical counterparts to three latent primitive shocks: a total factor productivity shock, a...

Aggregate stock prices, relative to virtually any indicator of fundamental value, soared to unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Even today, after the market declines since 2000, they remain well above historical norms. Why? We consider one particular explanation: a fall in macroeconomic risk, or...

bond markets calibrated to match the increase in foreign ownership of U.S. Treasury and agency debt from 2000-2007 generates an increase in national price-rent ratios comparable to that observed in U.S. data over this period. Moreover, in a simulated transition for the period 2000-2009, the...

This paper presents estimates of key preference parameters of the Epstein and Zin (1989, 1991) and Weil (1989) (EZW) recursive utility model, evaluates the model's ability to fit asset return data relative to other asset pricing models, and investigates the implications of such estimates for the...

Financial economists have long been interested in the empirical relation between the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock market returns, often referred to as the risk-return relation. Unfortunately, the body of empirical evidence on the risk-return relation is mixed and...

Value stocks have higher average returns than growth stocks. At the same time, the duration of value stocks' cash flows is considerably shorter than that of growth stocks. We show that when investors can fully distinguish short- and long-run consumption risk components of dividend growth...

A leading explanation of aggregate stock market behavior suggests that assets are priced as if there were a representative investor whose utility is a power function of the difference between aggregate consumption and a "habit" level, where the habit is some function of lagged and (possibly)...

The last 20 years have been marked by a sharp rise in international demand for U.S. reserve assets, or safe stores-of-value. We argue that these trends in international capital flows are likely to be a boon for some (by a lot) but a bane for others (by less). The young benefit from a capital...

Evidence of stock return predictability by financial ratios is still controversial, as documented by inconsistent results for in-sample and out-of-sample regressions and by substantial parameter instability. This paper shows that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if the...