The growth rate of total factor productivity seems to have increased recently, at least in the United States. Higher US productivity growth may justify higher stock market valuations than in the past and thus herald an emerging New Economy. However, the size of the estimated growth rate of total...

This paper shows that unexpected stock returns must be associated with changes in expected future dividends or expected future returns A vector autoregressive method is used to break unexpected stock returns into these two components. In U.S. monthly data in 1927-88, one-third of the variance of...

This paper proposes a GARCH-jump mixed model for individual stock returns that takes into account four types of risks: the systematic and idiosyncratic jumps and the systematic and idiosyncratic diffusive volatility. By considering a general pricing kernel with all underlying risk factors, we...

The present dissertationis devoted to the issue of price discovery in agricultural markets. Price discovery is considered one of the central functions of financial markets and is usually analyzed empirically for highly homogeneous assets traded on these markets. We investigate whether this...

I use a vector autoregressive model (VAR) to decompose an individual firm's stock return into two components: changes in cash-flow expectations (i.e., cash-flow news) and changes in discount rates (i.e., expected-return news). The VAR yields three main results. First, firm-level stock returns...