The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensations for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. While convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

This paper assesses the quantitative impact of ambiguity on historically observed financial asset returns and growth rates. The single agent, in a dynamic exchange economy, treats the conditional uncertainty about the consumption and dividends next period as ambiguous. We calibrate the agent's...

We examine asset prices in a representative-agent model of general equilibrium. Assuming only that individuals are risk averse, we determine conditions on the changes in asset risk that are both necessary and sufficient for the asset price to fall. We show that these conditions neither imply,...

I generalize the long-run risks (LRR) model of Bansal and Yaron (2004) by incorporating recursive smooth ambiguity aversion preferences from Klibanoff et al. (2005, 2009) and time-varying ambiguity. Relative to the Bansal-Yaron model, the generalized LRR model is as tractable but more flexible...

This chapter reviews the behavior of financial asset prices in relation to consumption. The chapter lists some important stylized facts that characterize U.S. data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which...

This paper shows the success of valuation risk-time‐preference shocks in Epstein-Zin utility-in resolving asset pricing puzzles rests sensitively on the way it is introduced. The specification used in the literature is at odds with several desirable properties of recursive preferences because...

This article studies the asset pricing and the business cycle implications of habit formation in a production economy with capital adjustment costs and endogenous labor supply. A specification of internal habit in the mix of consumption and leisure which minimizes the wealth effect on labor...

The equity premium puzzle holds that the coefficient of relative risk aversion estimated from the consumption based CAPM under power utility is excessively high. Moreover, estimates in the literature vary considerably across countries. We gauge the uncertainty pertaining to the country risk...

This paper introduces a model-free decomposition of S&P 500 forward market index returns in terms of realized and implied dispersion, downside, and tail risk using option portfolios. The decomposition lends itself by construction to learn about the different sources of risk in the market return,...