The U.S. economy is characterized by large, longer term regime shifts in asset values relative to macroeconomic fundamentals. These movements coincide with shifts in the real federal funds rate in excess of a measure of the natural rate of interest, and in equity market return premia. We specify...

In a recent paper (quot;A Primer on the Economics and Time Series Econometrics of Wealth Effects,quot; 2001), Davis and Palumbo investigate the empirical relation between three cointegrated variables: aggregate consumption, asset wealth, and labor income. Although cointegration implies that an...

We document large, longer-term, joint regime shifts in asset valuations and the real federal funds rate-r* spread. To interpret these findings, we estimate a novel macro-finance model of monetary transmission and find that the documented regimes coincide with shifts in the parameters of a policy...

Both textbook economics and common sense teach us that the value of household wealth should be related to consumer spending. At the same time, movements in asset values often seem disassociated with important movements in consumer spending, as episodes such as the 1987 stock market crash and the...