Recently a market in options based on CPI inflation (inflation caps and floors) has emerged in the US. This paper uses quotes on these derivatives to construct probability densities for inflation. We study how these pdfs respond to news announcements, and find that the implied odds of deflation...

We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500 options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. The latter is increasing in risk aversion in a wide variety of economic settings. We tackle several measurement issues assessing a plethora...

We present evidence that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and play a major role in driving asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences and a single state variable drives the...

Recent work in international finance suggests that the forward premium puzzle can be accounted for if (1) aggregate uncertainty is time-varying, and (2) countries have heterogeneous exposures to a world aggregate shock. We embed these features in a standard two-country real business cycle...

We study a new data set of prices of traded dividends with maturities up to 10 years across three world regions: the US, Europe, and Japan. We use these asset prices to construct equity yields, analogous to bond yields. We decompose these yields to obtain a term structure of expected dividend...

Do bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on their non-bankrupt competitors? We propose and analyze a collateral channel in which a firm's bankruptcy reduces collateral values of other industry participants, thereby increasing the cost of external debt finance industry wide. To identify...

To construct a business cycle model consistent with the observed behavior of asset prices, and study the effect of shocks to aggregate uncertainty, I introduce a small, time-varying risk of economic disaster in a standard real business cycle model. The paper establishes two simple theoretical...

To identify disruptions in credit markets, research on the role of asset prices in economic fluctuations has focused on the information content of various corporate credit spreads. We re-examine this evidence using a broad array of credit spreads constructed directly from the secondary bond...

We study a production economy with multiple sectors financed by issuing securities to agents who face capital constraints. Binding capital constraints propagate business cycles, and a reduction of the interest rate can increase the required return of high-haircut assets since it can increase the...

In this paper, I study asset prices in a two-agent macroeconomic model with two key features: limited participation in the stock market and heterogeneity in the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption (EIS). The model is consistent with some prominent features of asset prices...