Classical models predict that the division of stock returns into dividends and capital appreciation does not affect investor consumption patterns, while mental accounting and other economic frictions predict that investors have a higher propensity to consume from stock returns in the form of...

The ratio of total household debt to aggregate personal income in the United States has risen from an average of 0.6 in the 1980s to an average of 1.0 so far this decade. In this paper we explore the causes and consequences of this dramatic increase. Demographic shifts, house price increases,...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. In this paper, we discuss recent developments related to the...

We analyze an equilibrium model in which agents exposed to idiosyncratic risk can purchase insurance policies in addition to financial assets. The price of an insurance contract depends nonlinearly on the claims and explicitly contains safety loadings, proportional to variance. We consider...

This paper extends the VECM cointegration model and PT (permanent-transitory) variance decomposition framework proposed by Lettau amp; Ludvigson (2004) and applies them on the Swedish data spanning from 1980q1 to 2004q4. There are strong statistical evidences that the movements of aggregate...

Are securities markets more liquid when the economy is more liquid? If so, why? One possibility is that market depth depends on credit constrained intermediaries. This paper offers another explanation, which does not involve frictions or market segmentation. Measuring market illiquidity by the...

We consider an exchange economy under uncertainty, in which agents' utility functions exhibit constant absolute risk aversion, but they may be recursive and the expected utility calculation may be based on multiple subjective beliefs. The risk aversion coefficients, subjective beliefs,...

In a model of a two-period exchange economy under uncertainty, we find both upper and lower bounds for the risk free interest rate when the agents' utility functions exhibit constant absolute risk aversion. These bounds are independent of the degree of market incompleteness, and so in particular...

A so-called quot;asset market meltdown hypothesisquot; predicts that baby boomers' large savings will drive asset market booms that will eventually collapse because of the boomers' large retirement dissavings. As good news to baby boomers, our analysis shows that this meltdown hypothesis is...

Risk premia in the consumption capital asset pricing model depend on preferences and dividends. We develop a decomposition which allows for the separate treatment of both components. We show that preferences alone determine the risk-return trade-off measured by the Sharpe-ratio