In most countries, equity is a cheap source of funding for a country's largest financial institutions. On average, the stocks of the top 10% financial companies in a country account for over a quarter of total market capitalization, but these stocks earn returns that are significantly lower than...

Investors in option markets price in a substantial collective government bailout guarantee in the financial sector, which puts a floor on the equity value of the financial sector as a whole, but not on the value of the individual firms. The guarantee makes put options on the financial sector...

Value stocks have higher exposure to innovations in the nominal bond risk premium, which measures the markets' perception of cyclical variation in future output growth, than growth stocks. The ICAPM then predicts a value risk premium provided that good news about future output lowers the...

Our paper examines whether the well-documented failure of unsophisticated investors to rebalance their portfolios can help to explain the enormous counter-cyclical volatility of aggregate risk compensation in financial markets. To answer this question, we set up a model in which CRRA-utility...

This paper extends the methodology developed in Chien, Cole and Lustig (2011 & 2012) (hereafter CCL2011 and CCL2012, respectively) to analyze and compute the equilibria of economies with heterogeneous agents who have different asset trading technologies and are subject to both aggregate and...

We show that firms' idiosyncratic volatility obeys a strong factor structure and that shocks to the common factor in idiosyncratic volatility (CIV) are priced. Stocks in the lowest CIV-beta quintile earn average returns 5.4% per year higher than those in the highest quintile. The CIV factor...

We construct a new data set of consumption and income data for the largest US metropolitan areas, and we show that the covariance of regional consumption and income growth varies over time and in the cross-section. In times and regions where collateral is scarce, regional consumption growth is...

Aggregate consumption growth risk explains why low interest rate currencies do not appreciate as much as the interest rate differential and why high interest rate currencies do not depreciate as much as the interest rate differential. We sort foreign T-bills into portfolios based on the nominal...

We set up an exponentially affine stochastic discount factor model for bond yields and stock returns in order to estimate the prices of aggregate risk. We use the estimated risk prices to compute the no-arbitrage price of a claim to aggregate consumption. The price-dividend ratio of this claim...

We introduce limited liability in a model with a continuum of ex ante identical agents who face aggregate and idiosyncratic income risk. These agents can trade a complete menu of contingent claims, but they cannot commit and shares in a Lucas tree serve as collateral to back up their...