We construct shock elasticities that are pricing counterparts to impulse response functions. Recall that impulse response functions measure the importance of next-period shocks for future values of a time series. Shock elasticities measure the contributions to the price and to the expected...

Asset prices contain information about the probability distribution of future states and the stochastic discounting of these states. Without additional assumptions, probabilities and stochastic discounting cannot be separately identified. Ross (2013) introduced a set of assumptions that restrict...

Sparked by the recent "great recession" and the role of financial markets, considerable interest exists among researchers within both the academic community and the public sector in modeling and measuring systemic risk. In this essay I draw on experiences with other measurement agendas to place...

We must infer what the future situation would be without our interference, and what changes will be wrought by our actions. Fortunately, or unfortunately, none of these processes is infallible, or indeed ever accurate and complete. Knight (1921)

Recursive utility models of the type introduced by Kreps and Porteus (1978) are used extensively in applied research in macroeconomics and asset pricing in environments with uncertainty. These models represent preferences as the solution to a nonlinear forward-looking difference equation with a...

Asset pricing theory has long recognized that financial markets compensate investors who are exposed to some components of uncertainty. This is where macroeconomics comes into play. The economy-wide shocks, the primary concern of macroeconomists, by their nature are not diversifiable. Exposures...

Sparked by the recent “great recession†and the role of financial markets, considerable interest exists among researchers within both the academic community and the public sector in modeling and measuring systemic risk. In this essay I draw on experiences with other measurement agendas...

I explore methods that characterize model-based valuation of stochastically growing cash flows. Following previous research, I use stochastic discount factors as a convenient device to depict asset values. I extend that literature by focusing on the impact of compounding these discount factors...