We study an economy populated by three groups of logarithmic agents: Constrained agents subject to a portfolio constraint that limits their risk-taking, unconstrained agents subject to a standard nonnegative wealth constraint, and arbitrageurs with access to uncollateralized credit. Such credit...

If agents are ambiguity-averse and can invest in productive assets, asset prices can robustly exhibit indeterminacy in the markets that open after the productive investment has been launched. For indeterminacy to occur, the aggregate supply of goods must appear in precise configurations but the...

We investigate whether value-relevant foreign information only gradually dilutes into stock prices of multinational firms worldwide. Using an international sample of firms from 22 developed countries, we find that a portfolio strategy based on firms' foreign sales information yields future...

The Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index purports to measure irrational investor sentiment, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is designed to largely reflect fundamentals. Removing this fundamental component from the Baker and Wurgler index creates an index of investor...

We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing...

We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

We propose a new measure of the expected variance risk premium that is based on a forecast of the conditional variance from a GARCH-MIDAS model. We find that the new measure has strong predictive ability for future U.S. aggregate stock market returns and rationalize this result by showing that...

Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...