Average return differences among firms sorted on valuation ratios, past investment, prof-itability, market beta, or idiosyncratic volatility are largely driven by differences in exposures offirms to the same systematic factor related to embodied technology shocks. Using a calibratedstructural...

Standard theory implies that the discount rates used by firms in investment decisions (i.e., their required returns to capital) determine investment and transmit financial shocks to the real economy. However, there exists little evidence on how firms' discount rates change over time and affect...

Standard theory implies that the discount rates used by firms in investment decisions play a key role in determining investment and in transmitting shocks to asset prices and interest rates to the real economy. However, there exists little evidence on how corporate discount rates change over...

This paper investigates the determinants of credit spread changes on bonds denominated in euro. The analysis is carried out using a panel data on euro bonds. We try to asses the relative importance of market and idiosyncratic factors in explaining the movements in credit spread. Because credit...

We study the problem of detecting structural instability of factor strength in asset pricing models for financial returns. We allow for strong and weaker factors, in which the sum of squared betas grows at a rate equal to and slower than the number of test assets, respectively: this growth rate...

We use a two-sector model of structural transformation and balanced growth to show that the real interest rate, measured as the return on capital in units of GDP or in units of aggregate consumption, declines as income grows. This is due to the differential TFP growth in the goods producing...

Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century posits the return r on capital to be larger than the economic growth rate g as a main driver of inequalities. This article points out the circumstances under which the reverse inference holds. We show that increasing inequality promotes increasing...

Prior literature demonstrates that an increased trading activity of a fi rm's stock is associated with abnormal future stock returns (the high-volume return premium) and interprets this phenomenon as evidence that increased visibility generates reductions in cost of capital. Motivated by this...

This paper presents the business cycle model that Trygve Haavelmo developed as part of his research program in macroeconomic and monetary theory. Driven by a mismatch between the marginal return to capital and the rate of return required by capital owners, this model generates endogenous cycles....