Volatility permeates modern financial theories and decision making processes. As such, accurate measures and good forecasts of future volatility are critical for the implementation and evaluation of asset pricing theories. In response to this, a voluminous literature has emerged for modeling the...

In affine asset pricing models, the innovation to the pricing kernel is a function of innovations to current and expected future values of an economic state variable, for example consumption growth, aggregate market returns, or short-term interest rates. The impulse response of this priced...

We study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks when agents learn from nominal prices. While public releases have the benefit of providing new information, they can have the cost of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system. We show that,...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

Measuring the integration of world capital markets is notoriously difficult. For example, regulatory changes which appear comprehensive may have little impact on the functioning of the capital market if they fail to lead to foreign portfolio inflows. In contrast to the usual practice of...

We compare the out-of-sample forecasting performance of univariate homoskedastic, GARCH, autoregressive and nonparametric models for conditional variances, using five bilateral weekly exchange rates for the dollar, 1973-1989. For a one week horizon, GARCH models tend to make slightly more...

We develop a flexible semiparametric time series estimator that is then used to assess the causal effect of monetary policy interventions on macroeconomic aggregates. Our estimator captures the average causal response to discrete policy interventions in a macro-dynamic setting, without the need...

Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage such as options and leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors' leverage constraints and, therefore, we hypothesize that embedded leverage lowers required returns. Consistent with this hypothesis,...