Evidence suggests the volatility of stock prices cannot be accounted for by information about future dividends. The authors argue that some of the volatility of stock prices in excess of fundamentals results from fluctuations in the amount of public information over time. Their model assumes...

Investment of U.S. firms responds asymmetrically to Tobin's Q: Investment of established firms -- `intensive' investment -- reacts negatively to Q whereas investment of new firms -- `extensive' investment -- responds positively and elastically to Q. This asymmetry, we argue, reflects a...

Using 114 years of U.S. stock market data we try to relate movements in stock prices to changes in technology. We find measures of technological progress explain 37% of the 3.9% annual growth in the stock market over the 1885-1998 period, the "Jazz-Age" (1918-1934) entrants were not overvalued,...

The term "new economy" has, more than anything, come to mean a technological transformation, and in particular its embodiment in the computer and the internet. These technologies are more human capital intensive than earlier ones and have probably hastened the pace of the shift in the U.S....

U.S. Treasury securities are nominal assets that are subject to two sources of risk: inflation risk, and bond-supply risk. Inflation risk is well-known, but supply risk has received little attention. For reasons we shall discuss in the body of the paper, the amount of securities offered to the...

We analyze mergers over the past century in a growth model that emphasizes technological change. We explain the positive relation between mergers and stock prices, the positive relation between internal growth of firms and their acquisitions, and the positive relation of mergers with other...