We present a model in which some investors are prohibited from using leverage and other investors' leverage is limited by margin requirements. The former investors bid up high-beta assets while the latter agents trade to profit from this, but must de-lever when they hit their margin constraints....

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...

This paper examines the impact of globalization on the cost of equity capital. We argue that the cost of equity capital decreases because of globalization for two important reasons. First, the expected return that investors require to invest in equity to compensate them for the risk they bear...

The Fed model postulates that the dividend or earnings yield on stocks should equal the yield on nominal Treasury bonds, or at least that the two should be highly correlated. In US data, there is indeed a strikingly high time series correlation between the yield on nominal bonds and the dividend...

We apply the method of constrained asset share estimation (CASE) to test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) of the stock market. This method allows conditional expected returns to vary in unrestricted ways, given investor preferences. We also allow conditional variances to follow an ARCH...

Domestic investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest. This phenomenon has been called equity home bias.' In the absence of this home bias, investors would optimally diversify away domestic output...

This paper reviews the behavior of stock prices in relation to consumption. The paper lists some important stylized facts that characterize US data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which features of the US...

How does a firm in one country evaluate an investment in a firm in another country, or how does it evaluate a foreign project that the firm itself is undertaking? The firm must estimate future free cash flows just as in a domestic project, but choosing an appropriate discount rate is a...