In rare disaster models, it is a major challenge to generate large equity premium and low risk-free rate by imposing realistic consumption jump size. This paper addresses this issue based on a dynamic general equilibrium production economy with learning about rare disasters. Essentially, the...

A common prediction of macroeconomic models of credit market frictions is that the tightness of financial constraints is countercyclical. As a result, theory implies a negative collateralizability premium; that is, capital that can be used as collateral to relax financial constraints provides...

Financial markets have experienced unprecedented transformations, signs of which have emerged since the late 1970s. In recent years substantial consolidation occurred. In response to changes in macroeconomic variables, such as GDP, industrial production, inflation and the political business...

This paper explores a new approach to identifying government spending shocks which avoids many of the shortcomings of existing approaches. The new approach is to identify government spending shocks with statistical innovations to the accumulated excess returns of large US military contractors....

In this paper, we provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. We stress the importance of distinguishing between realized volatility and implied volatility, and find that implied...

Following recent advances in the non-parametric realized volatility approach, we separately measure the discontinuous jump part of the quadratic variation process for individual stocks and incorporate it into heterogeneous autoregressive volatility models. We analyze the distributional...

The general conclusion of a very large literature on the equity premium puzzle is that the simplest version of the consumption-based asset pricing model (C-CAPM) with time-additive, power utility is inconsistent with the data. I show that this conclusion is premature and the simplest version can...

We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

We present an intertemporal consumption model of consumer investment in financial literacy. Consumers benefit from such investment because their stock of financial literacy allows them to increase the returns on their wealth. Since literacy depreciates over time and has a cost in terms of...

We study the relation between cognitive abilities and stockholding using the recent Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which has detailed data on wealth and portfolio composition of individuals aged 50+ in 11 European countries and three indicators of cognitive abilities:...