We develop a model of political cycles driven by time-varying risk aversion. Agents choose to work in the public or private sector and to vote Democrat or Republican. In equilibrium, when risk aversion is high, agents elect Democrats---the party promising more redistribution. The model predicts...

This paper estimate causal effects of being elected in a local election on monetary returns. The claim for causality can be made thanks to a research design where the income of some candidate who just barely won a seat is compared to that of some other candidate who was close to winning a seat...

The decision of whether to retain forest or convert to another land use is affected by uncertainty over future land-use returns. This paper examines the design of conservation payments to landowners under uncertainty. Payments are indexed to the returns from forest conversion (agriculture), or...

We use multivariate random forests to compute out-of-sample forecasts of a vector of returns of four precious metal prices (gold, silver, platinum, and palladium). We compare the multivariate forecasts with univariate out-of-sample forecasts implied by random forests independently fitted to...

We examine whether investors efficiently incorporate the effect of financial sector shocks into the equity prices of non-financial firms. Shocks to the financial sector are complex macroeconomic events affecting many firms to varying degrees. Prices may adjust slowly in response to financial...