We discover a novel monetary policy shock that has a widespread impact on aggregate financial conditions. Our shock can be summarized by the response of long-horizon yields to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements; not only is it orthogonal to changes in the near-term path of policy...

This paper uses Hansen and Jagannathan's (1991) volatility bounds to evaluate models with idiosyncratic consumption risk. I show that idiosyncratic risk does not change the volatility bounds at all when consumers have CRRA preferences and the distribution of the idiosyncratic shock is...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund's alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

Loss aversion has been used to explain why a high equity premium might be consistent with plausible levels of risk aversion. The intuition is that the different utility impact of wealth gains and losses leads loss-averse investors to behave similarly to investors with high risk aversion. But if...

We examine the implications of time variation in the correlation between the equity premium and nondurable consumption growth for equity return dynamics in G-7 countries. Using a VAR-GARCH (1,1) model, we find that the correlation increases with recession indicators such as above-average...

This paper analyzes the impact of unanticipated changes in the federal funds rate target on equity prices, with the aim of both estimating the size of the typical reaction and understanding the reasons for the market's response. We find that over the June 1989-December 2002 sample period, a...

We explore the term structures of claims to a variety of cash flows: U.S. government bonds (claims to dollars), foreign government bonds (claims to foreign currency), inflation-adjusted bonds (claims to the price index), and equity (claims to future equity indexes or dividends). Average term...

We estimate the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed...

We examine the relationship between monetary policy operations and interbank borrowing and lending of funds using sovereign bonds as collateral. We first establish that, in the precrisis period, there are important but rather weak relations between these funding sources and that this...

Although China now has one of the largest government bond markets in the world, the market has received relatively little attention and analysis. We describe the history and structure of the market and assess its functioning. We find that trading in individual bonds was historically sparse but...