We present evidence that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and drive asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences. A single state variable drives the conditional cross-sectional...

We show that in a model with equity and debt financing, the specfication of the borrowing constraint is crucial to generate empirically plausible responses of macro variables and asset prices to financial shocks. The interaction between financial frictions and labor demand, as in Jermann and...

In a production economy with trade in financial markets motivated by the desire to share labor-income risk and to speculate, we show that speculation increases volatility of asset returns and investment growth, increases the equity risk premium, and reduces welfare. Regulatory measures, such as...

This paper analytically solves a heterogeneous agent model with idiosyncratic shocks to marginal utility of consumption and explores the effects of the borrowing constraint on the price of the asset, the composition of borrowers and lenders in the credit market, and wealth inequality. Results...

We explore the implications of shocks to expected future productivity in a setting with limited enforcement of financial contracts. As in Lorenzoni andWalentin (2007) optimal financial contracts under limited enforcement imply that to obtain external finance firms have to post collateral in...

This study augments the neoclassical growth model with a mechanism that creates a novel transmission channel through which financial shocks propagate to the real economy. By affecting agents' ability to finance consumption expenditures, financial frictions create a demand for safe assets that...

Endogenous movements in the wealth distribution can generate asset price booms in which financial intermediaries increasingly engage in moral hazard and originate low-quality assets that are excessively exposed to aggregate risk. Central to the mechanism is a pecuniary externality whereby buyers...

We develop a dynamic model with time variation in external equity financing costs and show that variation in these costs is important for the model to quantitatively capture the joint dynamics of firms' asset prices, real quantities, and financial flows in the U.S. economy. Growth firms and high...