Historical data and model simulations support the following conclusion. Inflation is low during stock market booms, so that an interest rate rule that is too narrowly focused on inflation destabilizes asset markets and the broader economy. Adjustments to the interest rate rule can remove this...

This paper shows that the stock market downturns of 2000-2002 and 2007-09 have very different proximate causes. The early 2000's saw a large increase in the discount rates applied to corporate profits by rational investors, while the late 2000's saw a decrease in rational expectations of future...

We show that the stock market may fail to aggregate information even if it appears to be efficient, and that the resulting decrease in the information content of prices may drastically reduce welfare. We solve a macroeconomic model in which information about fundamentals is dispersed and...

This paper uses monthly returns from 1802-2010, daily returns from 1885-2010, and intraday returns from 1982-2010 in the United States to show how stock volatility has changed over time. It also uses various measures of volatility implied by option prices to infer what the market was expecting...

Background: The fact that many individuals inexplicably fail to buy stocks, despite the historical evidence for a good return on investment has been referred to as the stock market puzzle. However, measurements of the subjective probability of a gain show that people are more pessimistic than...

We propose a simple framework to assess the costs of nominal price adjustment using stock market returns. We document that, after monetary policy announcements, the conditional volatility rises more for firms with stickier prices than for firms with more flexible prices. This differential...

We develop a general equilibrium model of asset prices in which the benefits of technological innovation are distributed asymmetrically. Financial market participants do not capture all the economic rents resulting from innovative activity, even when they own shares in innovating firms. Economic...

Price efficiency plays an important role in financial markets. Firms influence it, particularly when they issue public equity. They can hire a reputable underwriter with a star analyst to generate public signals about profits, thereby reducing uncertainty and increasing valuations. We develop an...

The largest commercial bank stocks, ranked by total size of the balance sheet, have significantly lower risk-adjusted returns than small- and medium-sized bank stocks, even though large banks are significantly more levered. We uncover a size factor in the component of bank returns that is...

Stock prices are more informative when the information has less social value. Speculators with limited resources making costly (private) information production decisions must decide to produce information about some firms and not others. We show that producing and trading on private information...