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...

The last fifteen years have been marked by a dramatic boom-bust cycle in real estate prices, accompanied by economically large fluctuations in international capital flows. We argue that changes in international capital flows played, at most, a small role in driving house price movements in this...

Identifying assumptions need to be imposed on dynamic models before they can be used to analyze the dynamic effects of economically interesting shocks. Often, the assumptions are only rich enough to identify a set of solutions. This paper considers two types of restrictions on the structural...

This paper uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period 1962-97 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly correlations among individual stocks and...

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...

We propose a new method for estimating latent asset pricing factors that fit the time-series and cross-section of expected returns. Our estimator generalizes Principal Component Analysis (PCA) by including a penalty on the pricing error in expected returns. We show that our estimator strongly...

We develop an estimator for latent factors in a large-dimensional panel of financial data that can explain expected excess returns. Statistical factor analysis based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has problems identifying factors with a small variance that are important for asset pricing....

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) represent one of the most important financial innovations in decades. An ETF is an investment vehicle that trades intraday and seeks to replicate the performance of a specific index. In recent years ETFs have grown substantially in assets, diversity, and market...

This paper proposes a dynamic risk-based model capable of jointly explaining the term structure of interest rates, returns on the aggregate market and the risk and return characteristics of value and growth stocks. Both the term structure of interest rates and returns on value and growth stocks...

Evidence of stock return predictability by financial ratios is still controversial, as documented by inconsistent results for in-sample and out-of-sample regressions and by substantial parameter instability. This paper shows that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if the...