To understand their financial position, universities need to understand the long-term implications of their operating revenues and costs in relation to the financial assets they have available. Standard budgeting procedures that focus on one or two years at a time and use generally accepted...

The exposure of US Treasury bonds to the stock market has moved considerably over time. While it was slightly positive on average in the period 1960-2011, it was unusually high in the 1980s and negative in the 2000s, a period during which Treasury bonds enabled investors to hedge macroeconomic...

This paper extends the approximate closed-form intertemporal capital asset pricing model of Campbell (1993) to allow for stochastic volatility. The return on the aggregate stock market is modeled as one element of a vector autoregressive (VAR) system, and the volatility of all shocks to the VAR...

This paper explores the history of inflation-indexed bond markets in the US and the UK. It documents a massive decline in long-term real interest rates from the 1990's until 2008, followed by a sudden spike in these rates during the financial crisis of 2008. Breakeven inflation rates, calculated...

This paper explores the history of inflation-indexed bond markets in the US and the UK. It documents a massive decline in long-term real interest rates from the 1990's until 2008, followed by a sudden spike in these rates during the financial crisis of 2008. Breakeven inflation rates, calculated...

The welfare benefits of financial markets depend in large part on how effectively households use these markets. The study of household finance is challenging because household behavior is difficult to measure accurately, and because households face constraints that are not captured by textbook...

Within the last five years, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand have joined the ranks of the United Kingdom and other countries in issuing government bonds that are indexed to inflation. Some observers of the experience in these countries have argued that the United States should follow suit. This...

Recent research in empirical finance has documented that expected excess returns on bonds and stocks, real interest rates, and risk shift over time in predictable ways. Furthermore, these shifts tend to persist over long periods of time. In this paper we propose an empirical model that is able...

This paper explores the effect of equity volatility on corporate bond yields. Panel data for the late 1990's show that idiosyncratic firm-level volatility can explain as much cross-sectional variation in yields as can credit ratings. This finding, together with the upward trend in idiosyncratic...

Much recent work has documented evidence for predictability of asset returns. We show how such predictability can affect the portfolio choices of long-lived investors who value wealth not for its own sake but for the consumption their wealth can support. We develop an approximate solution method...