This paper explores asset pricing implications of unemployment risk from sectoral shifts. I proxy for this risk using cross-industry dispersion (CID), defined as a mean absolute deviation of returns of 49 industry portfolios. CID peaks during periods of accelerated sectoral reallocation and...

We develop an equilibrium lifecycle model of education, marriage and labor supply and consumption in a transferable utility context. Individuals start by choosing their investments in education anticipating returns in the marriage market and the labor market. They then match based on the...

The last 15 years has brought forth an explosion of research on consumption-based asset pricing as a leading contender for explaining aggregate stock market behavior. This research has propelled further interest in consumption-based asset pricing, as well as some debate. This chapter surveys the...

Electricity consumption is a useful real-time proxy for economic activities, as most modern-day economic activities involve the use of electricity, which cannot be easily stored. Empirically, electricity consumption data is widely available in high frequency at both aggregate and disaggregate...

The paper investigates the role of the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES ) in determining the equity premium. This is done in an overlapping generations economy populated by agents that live for 2 periods and maximize a Kihlstrom-Mirman expected utility function. The equity premium...

We conduct empirical tests of a simplified version of the ratio habit model developed in Abel(1990), in which habit is extended beyond the preceding period. We show that change in four-year consumption growth---the measure of consumption resulting from our ratio habit preference---explains the...

How important are volatility fluctuations for asset prices and the macroeconomy? We find that a rise in macroeconomic volatility is associated with a rise in discount rates and a decline in consumption. To study the impact of volatility we provide a framework in which cashflow, discount-rate,...

We examine the implications of short-run and long-run consumption risks on the momentum and long-term contrarian profits and the value premium in a unified economic framework. By introducing time-varying firm cash flow exposures to the short-run and long-run shocks in consumption growth, we find...

We show that a business-cycle component of consumption growth (dubbed business-cycle consumption) with cycles between 2 and 4 years is effective in explaining the differences in risk premia across alternative test assets, including recently-proposed anomaly portfolios. We formalize the mapping...