Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

In a capitalist economy prices serve to equilibrate supply and demand for goods and services, continually changing to reallocate resources to their most efficient uses. Secondary stock market prices, however, often viewed as the most 'informationally efficient' prices in the economy, have no...

EGARCH-M models based on a daily, weekly, and monthly S&P–500 returns over the period October 1934–September 1994 reveal that higher margins have a much stronger negative relation to subsequent volatility in bull markets than in bear markets. Higher margins are also negatively related to...

Market thinness can be an important determinant of the riskiness of stock returns, because it reduces the reliability of stock prices as predictors of future dividends. This paper analyses the relationship between market size and risk as the outcome of rational expectations equilibrium in a...

Thin equity markets cannot accommodate temporary bulges of buy or sell orders without large price movements: the resulting volatility can induce risk-averse transactors who face transaction costs to desert these markets altogether. Thus thinness and the consequent price volatility may become...

This paper uses aggregate Japanese data and sectoral US data to explore the properties of the joint behaviour of stock prices and total factor productivity (TFP) with the aim of highlighting data patterns that are useful for evaluating business cycle theories. The approach used follows that...

In this we specify and jointly estimate supply, demand and price equations for four aggregate commodity groups: food, beverages, agricultural raw materials and metals. This simple structural model allows us, for each group of commodities, to incorporate stock data for the first time, and to...

We examine the evolution of international currency exposures, with a particular focus on the 2002-12 period. During the run up to the global financial crisis, there was a widespread shift towards positive net foreign currency positions, such that relatively few countries exhibited the archetypal...

This paper incorporates a global bank into a two-country business cycle model. The bank collects deposits from households and makes loans to entrepreneurs, in both countries. It has to finance a fraction of loans using equity. We investigate how such a bank capital requirement affects the...

We study the changing international transmission of US financial shocks over the period 1971-2009. Financial shocks are defined as unexpected changes of a financial conditions index (FCI), recently developed by Hatzius et al. (2010), for the US. We use a time-varying factor-augmented VAR to...