The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility ("uncertainty"), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

We provide an empirical evaluation of the forward-looking long-run risks (LRR) model and highlight model differences with the backward-looking habit based asset pricing model. We feature three key results: (i) Consistent with the LRR model, there is considerable evidence in the data of...

Recently much progress has been made in developing optimal portfolio choice models accomodating time-varying opportunity sets, but unless investors are unreasonably risk averse, optimal holdings include unreasonably large equity positions. One reason is that most studies assume investors behave...

The equity variance risk premium is the expected compensation earned for selling variance risk in equity markets. The variance risk premium is positive and shows moderate persistence. High variance risk premiums coincide with the left tail of the consumption growth distribution shifting down....

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...

The paper estimates and examines the empirical plausibiltiy of asset pricing models that attempt to explain features of financial markets such as the size of the equity premium and the volatility of the stock market. In one model, the long run risks model of Bansal and Yaron (2004), low...

We identify the relative importance of changes in the conditional variance of fundamentals (which we call "uncertainty") and changes in risk aversion ("risk" for short) in the determination of the term structure, equity prices and risk premiums. Theoretically, we introduce persistent...

We model dividend and consumption growth rates as containing a small long-run predictable component and economic uncertainty (i.e., growth rate volatility) as being time-varying. The magnitudes of the predictable variation and changing volatility in growth rates, as in the data, are quite small....

We show how to use conditioning information optimally to construct a sharper unconditional Hansen-Jagannathan (1991) bound. The approach in this paper is different from that of Gallant, Hansen and Tauchen (1990), but both approaches yield the same bound when the conditional moments are known....

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...