We use a DSGE model that generates endogenous movements in risk premia to examine the positive and normative implications of alternative monetary policy rules. As emphasized by the micro-finance literature, variation in risk arises because households face fixed costs of transferring cash across...

Employee share ownership is growing increasingly important. This paper studies employee share ownership in an economy with one monopoly union for each firm. We modify an implicit contract model by adding dividend income to the usual wage income. Union members differ in exogenous stock endowments...

This paper shows how risk may aggravate fluctuations in economies with imperfect insurance and multiple assets. A two period job matching model is studied, in which risk averse agents act both as workers and as entrepreneurs. They choose between two types of investment: one type is riskless,...

I first show that taking moving averages of the term spread, the dividend yield, and the Shiller’s CAPE, significantly increases their ability to predict one month and 12-month forward equity market excess returns, and the state of the business cycle. Dividend yield, CAPE and term spread are...

Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: Poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms-when expected...

Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper...

We develop a structural model that incorporates both macroeconomic risks and firm-specific jump risks. Using this model, we derive analytic formulas for default probability, equity price, and CDS spreads. We show that including the two types of risk in credit risk modeling can generate better...

Macro-based asset allocation, i.e., the identification of turning points in macro-financial cycles and the allocation of assets accordingly, has attracted a lot of interest in recent years. This interest was sparked by volatile financial markets, more synchronized returns across asset classes...

Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper...

We analyze optimal monetary policy and its implications for asset prices, when aggregate demand has inertia and responds to asset prices with a lag. If there is a negative output gap, the central bank optimally overshoots aggregate asset prices (asset prices are initially pushed above their...