High rates of government investment in public sector capital forecast high risk premiums both at the aggregate and firm-level. This result is in sharp contrast with the well-documented negative relationship between the private sector investment rate and risk premiums. To explain the empirical...

A stochastic discount factor for asset returns is recovered from equilibrium marginal rates of transformation inferred from producers' first-order conditions. The marginal rate of transformation implies a novel macro-factor asset pricing model that does a reasonable job explaining the...

Long-run productivity risk – shocks to the growth rate of productivity – offers an alternative to microfrictions explanations of aggregate investment non-linearities, in particular the heteroscedasticity of investment rate. Additionally, consistent with the data, these shocks imply that...

A deep-ingrained doctrine in asset pricing says that if an empirical characteristic-return relation is consistent with investor “rationality,” the relation must be “explained” by a risk (factor) model. The investment approach questions the doctrine. Factors formed on characteristics are...