We are interested in the effect of capital income taxes upon security prices when investors face locally segmented stock markets and a global bond market. Therefore, we analyze an equilibrium model of an economy with binomial uncertainty, an exogenous risk-free interest rate and a representative...

Real risk-free interest rates have trended down over the past 30 years. Puzzlingly in light of this decline, (1) the return on private capital has remained stable or even increased, creating an increasing wedge with safe interest rates; (2) stock market valuation ratios have increased only...

This paper investigates how concentrated ownership of capital influences the pricing of risky assets in a production economy. The model is designed to approximate the skewed distribution of wealth and income in U.S. data. I show that concentrated ownership significantly magnifies the equity risk...

Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper...

The 1987 stock market crash occurred with minimal impact on observable economic variables (e.g., consumption), yet dramatically and permanently changed the shape of the implied volatility curve for equity index options. Here, we propose a general equilibrium model that captures many salient...

The 1987 market crash was associated with a dramatic and permanent steepening of the implied volatility curve for equity index options, despite minimal changes in aggregate consumption. We explain these events within a general equilibrium framework in which expected endowment growth and economic...

We derive new results on the asymptotic behavior of the estimated parameters of a linear asset pricing model and their associated t-statistics in the presence of a factor that is independent of the returns. The inclusion of this useless factor in the model leads to a violation of the full rank...

We discuss the impact of different formulations of asset pricing models on the outcome of specification tests that are performed using excess returns. It is generally believed that when only excess returns are used for testing asset pricing models, the mean of the stochastic discount factor...

Although it is of interest to empirical researchers to test whether or not a particular asset-pricing model is true, a more useful task is to determine how wrong a model is and to compare the performance of competing asset-pricing models. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to test...

We examine the returns to investors in publicly traded stock in new industries. We examine data from the United States on sellers of own-brand personal computers, airlines and airplane manufacturers, automobile manufacturers, railroads, and telegraphs. We find that a relatively small number of...