The consumption beta theorem of Breeden makes the expected return on any asset a function only of its covariance with changes in aggregate consumption. It is shown that the theorem is more robust than was indicated by Breeden. The theorem obtains even if one deletes Breeden's assumptions that...

The currency market features a relatively small cross-section and conditional expected returns can be characterized by only a few signals - interest differentials, trend, and mean-reversion. We exploit these properties to construct a conditional projection of the stochastic discount factor onto...

Our objective is to identify the trading strategy that would allow an investor to take advantage of "excessive" stock price volatility and "sentiment" fluctuations. We construct a general-equilibrium model of sentiment. In it, there are two classes of agents and stock prices are excessively...

The risk factors in many consumption-based asset pricing models display statistically weak correlation with the returns being priced. Some GMM-based procedures used to test these models have very low power to reject proposed stochastic discount factors (SDFs) when they are misspecified and the...

The recently developed long-run risks asset pricing model shows that concerns about long-run expected growth and time-varying uncertainty (i.e., volatility) about future economic prospects drive asset prices. These two channels of economic risks can account for the risk premia and asset price...

We introduce limited liability in a model with a continuum of ex ante identical agents who face aggregate and idiosyncratic income risk. These agents can trade a complete menu of contingent claims, but they cannot commit and shares in a Lucas tree serve as collateral to back up their...

In the asset pricing literature, time-variation in market expected excess return captured by financial ratios like dividend yield is typically viewed as a reflection of either changing risk, related to the business cycle, or irrational mispricing. Extending the work on asset allocation and...

We study the asset pricing implications of a multi-agent endowment economy where agents can default on contracts that would leave them otherwise worse off. We specialize and extend the environment studied by Kocherlakota (1995) and Kehoe and Levine (1993) to make it comparable to standard...

The ability to identify which factors best capture systematic return covariation is central to applications of multifactor pricing models. This paper uses a common data set to evaluate the performance of various proposed factors in capturing return comovements. Factors associated with the...

This paper investigates the statistical properties of high frequency nominal exchange rates and forward premiums in the context of a dynamic two-country general equilibrium model. Primary focus is on the persistence, variability, leptokurtosis and conditional heteroskedasticity of exchange rates...