In most countries, equity is a cheap source of funding for a country's largest financial institutions. On average, the stocks of the top 10% financial companies in a country account for over a quarter of total market capitalization, but these stocks earn returns that are significantly lower than...

"We use bank stock returns to develop an ex-ante measure of the distortion created by the implicit collective guarantee extended to large U.S. financial institutions. The average return on a stock portfolio that goes long in the largest U.S. commercial banks and short in the smallest banks is...

"We propose an arbitrage-free stochastic discount factor (SDF) model that jointly prices the cross-section of returns on portfolios of stocks sorted on book-to-market dimension, the cross-section of government bonds sorted by maturity, the dynamics of bond yields, and time series variation in...

"To measure the wealth-consumption ratio, we estimate an exponentially affine model of the stochastic discount factor on bond yields and stock returns. We use that discount factor to compute the no-arbitrage price of a claim to aggregate US consumption. Our estimates indicate that total wealth...