This paper addresses two important parts of the problem of saving for retirement. They are (1) if assets are to be held in both conventional (and hence taxable) accounts and pension accounts, which assets should be held in each? and, (2) if the investor is substantially risk averse, what is the...

We provide causal evidence for the value of asset pledgeability. Our empirical strategy is based on a unique feature of the Chinese corporate bond markets, where bonds with identical fundamentals are simultaneously traded on two segmented markets that feature different rules for repo...

We propose an approach to identifying economic shocks (monetary, growth, and risk-premium news) from stock returns and Treasury yield changes, which allows us to study the drivers of asset prices at a daily frequency since the early 1980s. We apply the identification to examine investors'...

We present a model in which some investors are prohibited from using leverage and other investors' leverage is limited by margin requirements. The former investors bid up high-beta assets while the latter agents trade to profit from this, but must de-lever when they hit their margin constraints....

Working with a sizeable, anonymous money manager, we randomly make available for lending two-thirds of the high-loan fee stocks in the manager's portfolio and withhold the other third to produce an exogenous shock to loan supply. We implement the lending experiment in two independent phases: the...

Value stocks have higher exposure to innovations in the nominal bond risk premium, which measures the markets' perception of cyclical variation in future output growth, than growth stocks. The ICAPM then predicts a value risk premium provided that good news about future output lowers the...

To identify disruptions in credit markets, research on the role of asset prices in economic fluctuations has focused on the information content of various corporate credit spreads. We re-examine this evidence using a broad array of credit spreads constructed directly from the secondary bond...

The covariance between US Treasury bond returns and stock returns has moved considerably over time. While it was slightly positive on average in the period 1953--2009, it was unusually high in the early 1980''s and negative in the 2000''s, particularly in the downturns of 2000--02 and 2007--09....

This paper shows how lifelong survival-contingent payouts can enhance investor wellbeing in the context of a portfolio choice model which integrates uninsurable labor income and asymmetric mortality expectations. Our model generates optimal asset location patterns indicating how much to hold in...

We establish an empirical link between the ex-ante uncertainty about macroeconomic fundamentals and the ex-post resolution of this uncertainty in financial markets. We measure macroeconomic uncertainty using prices of economic derivatives and relate this measure to changes in implied...