We introduce a simple adverse selection problem arising in credit markets into a standard textbook real business cycle model. There is a continuum of households and a continuum of anonymous producers who produce the final goods from intermediate goods. These producers do not have the resources...

This paper studies three different measures of monthly stock market volatility: the time-series volatility of daily market returns within the month; the cross-sectional volatility or 'dispersion' of daily returns on industry portfolios, relative to the market, within the month; and the...

Fluctuations in real GNP have traditionally been viewed as transitory deviations from a deterministic time trend. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent developments that have led to a new view of output fluctuations and then to provide some additional evidence. Using post-war...

The long-run risks model of asset prices explains stock price variation as a response to persistent fluctuations in the mean and volatility of aggregate consumption growth, by a representative agent with a high elasticity of intertemporal substitution. This paper documents several empirical...

This paper reviews the behavior of financial asset 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...

We present a consumption-based model that explains the procyclical variation of stock prices, the long-horizon predictability of excess stock returns, and the countercyclical variation of stock market volatility. Our model has an i.i.d. consumption growth driving process, and adds a slow-moving...

It is sometimes argued that an increase in stock market volatility raises required stock returns, and thus lowers stock prices. This paper modifies the generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic (GARCH) model of returns to allow for this volatility feedback effect. The resulting...

This paper studies how financial information frictions can generate sentiment-driven fluctuations in asset prices and self-fulfilling business cycles. In our model economy, exuberant financial market sentiments of high output and high demand for capital increase the price of capital, which...

In the U.S. economy over the past twenty five years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight...

We study a model where some agents have private information about risky asset returns and trade to obtain capital gains, while others acquire the risky asset and hold it to maturity, forming expectations of returns based on market prices. We show that under such a structure, in addition to fully...