"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...

"Currency excess returns are highly predictable, more than stock returns, and about as much as bond returns. In addition, these predicted excess returns are strongly counter-cyclical. The average excess returns on low interest rate currencies are 4.8 percent per annum smaller than those on high...

"The average forward discount of the dollar against developed market currencies is the best predictor of average foreign currency excess returns earned by U.S. investors on a long position in a large basket of foreign currencies and a short position in the dollar. The predicted excess returns...

"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...

"We find that the US consumption growth beta of an investment strategy that goes long in high interest rate currencies and short in low interest rate currencies is larger than one. These consumption beta estimates are statistically significant, contrary to what is claimed by Burnside (2007)....