We study the asset pricing implications of learning in an environment in which the true model of the world is a multivariate one, but agents update only over the class of simple univariate models. Thus, if a particular simple model does a poor job of forecasting over a period of time, it is...

Implicit in the prices of traded financial assets are Arrow-Debreu prices or, with continuous states, the state-price density (SPD). We construct a nonparametric estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and we derive its asymptotic sampling theory. This estimator provides an...

This paper evaluates the equity premium using novel data on the consumption of luxury goods. Specifying utility as a nonhomothetic function of both luxury and basic consumption goods, we derive pricing equations and evaluate the risk of holding equity. Household survey and national accounts data...

This paper applies to interest rate models the theoretical method developed in Aït-Sahalia (1998) to generate accurate closed-form approximations to the transition function of an arbitrary diffusion. While the main focus of this paper is on the maximum-likelihood estimation of interest rate...

Can discretely sampled financial data help us decide which continuous-time models are sensible? Diffusion processes are characterized by the continuity of their sample paths. This cannot be verified from the discrete sample path: Even if the underlying path were continuous, data sampled at...

We study asset allocation when the conditional moments of returns are partly predictable. Rather than first model the return distribution and subsequently characterize the portfolio choice, we determine directly the dependence of the optimal portfolio weights on the predictive variables. We...