This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

We provide novel evidence on the driving forces behind the sharp increase in equity values over the post-war era. From the beginning of 1989 to the end of 2017, 23 trillion dollars of real equity wealth was created by the nonfinancial corporate sector. We estimate that 54% of this increase was...

This paper studies the ability of a general class of habit-based asset pricing models to match the conditional moment restrictions implied by asset pricing theory. We treat the functional form of the habit as unknown, and to estimate it along with the rest of the model's finite dimensional...

We find evidence of infrequent shifts, or "regimes," in the mean of the asset valuation variable <i>cay_t</i> that are strongly associated with low-frequency fluctuations in the real federal funds rate, with low policy rates associated with high asset valuations, and vice versa. There is no evidence...

A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...