We find that the FOMC-announcement-day return premium earned by a firm is positively related to the increase in its ex ante, option-implied skewness prior to the announcement. This finding is consistent with: (1) the existence of an announcement-day Fed put that is partially anticipated by the...

Since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began announcing its policy decisions in 1994, U.S. stock returns have on average been more than thirty times larger on announcement days than on other days. Surprisingly, these abnormal returns are accrued before the policy announcement. The excess...

Recent findings on the term structure of equity and bond yields pose serious challenges to existing models of equilibrium asset pricing. This paper presents a new equilibrium model of subjective expectations to explain the joint historical dynamics of equity and bond yields (and their yield...

The key insight from this analysis is that monetary policy should be responding more to negative shocks than positive shocks: optimal monetary policy is asymmetric. Moreover, if we take the stance that asset prices indicate a high cost of exposure to long-run risks, this has very interesting...