We examine asset prices in a representative-agent model of general equilibrium. Assuming only that individuals are risk averse, we determine conditions on the changes in asset risk that are both necessary and sufficient for the asset price to fall. We show that these conditions neither imply,...

We sort currencies by countries' consumption growth over the past four quarters. Currency portfolios of countries experiencing consumption booms have higher Sharpe ratios than those of countries going through a consumption-based recession. A carry strategy that goes short in countries that are...

We document the empirical fact that asset prices in the consumption-goods and investment-goods sector behave almost identically in the US economy. In order to derive the cyclical behavior of the equity returns in these two sectors, we consider a standard two-sector real-business cycle model with...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

In this paper we are concerned with the role of factor strength and pricing errors in asset pricing models, and their implications for identification and estimation of risk premia. We establish an explicit relationship between the pricing errors and the presence of weak factors that are...

This paper examines the role of pricing errors in linear factor pricing models, allowing for observed strong and semi-strong factors, and latent weak factors. It focusses on the estimation of ∅k = λk − μk which plays a pivotal role, not only in the estimation of risk premia but also in...

We examine the asymmetric impact of shocks to macroeconomic expectations and their underlying dispersion on equity risk premia across different market regimes. First, we rely on a two-state logit mixture vector autoregressive model and use Consensus Economics survey data on GDP growth,...

In this article, we shed more light on the covariances versus characteristics debate by investigating the explanatory power of the instrumented principal component analysis (IPCA), recently proposed by Kelly et al. (2019). They conclude that characteristics are covariances because there is no...