Stocks have outperformed government bonds, on average, by a large margin in historical data. However, most U.S. households do not own stocks, either directly or indirectly. Also, stocks are highly concentrated in the hands of relatively few wealthy people. In this article, Hui Guo describes some...

Stock price, because it is a forward-looking variable, forecasts economic activities. An unexpected increase in stock price reflects that (i) future dividend growth is higher and/or (ii) future discount rates are lower than previously anticipated; therefore, the increase predicts higher output and...

Oil shocks exert influence on macroeconomic activity through various channels, many of which imply a symmetric effect. However, the effect can also be asymmetric. In particular, sharp oil price changes-either increases or decreases-may reduce aggregate output temporarily because they delay...

In this article, Hui Guo shows that, if stock volatility follows an AR(1) process, stock market returns relate positively to past volatility but relate negatively to contemporaneous volatility in Merton’s (1973) Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model. The model helps explain the recent...

Many authors have found that the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) does not explain stock returns—possibly because it is only a special case of Merton’s (1973) intertemporal CAPM under the assumption of constant investment opportunities (e.g., a constant expected equity premium). This paper...