We show that countries that take on more international risk are rewarded with higher expected consumption growth. International risk is defined as the beta of a country’s consumption growth with world consumption growth. High-beta countries hold more foreign assets, as predicted by the theory....

We examine a trivariate time series model that is subject to a regime switch, where the shifts are governed by an unobserved, two-state variable that follows a Markov process. The analysis is performed in a Bayesian framework developed by Albert and Chib (1993), where the unobserved states are...

I develop a representative agent model in which the purchase of consumption goods must be planned in advance. Volatility in the agent's portfolio increases the risk that a purchase cannot be implemented. This implementation risk causes the agent to make conservative consumption plans. In the...

Robust empirical evidence suggests that a steep slope of the nominal yield curve predicts an increase in the future real activity. We show that the negative of the slope closely traces the variation in the ex-ante real rate. We then argue that the predictive content of the slope for real...

This paper shows, from the consumer budget constraint, that the consumption spending and the different components of total wealth, i.e. financial, housing and human wealths, are cointegrated and that deviations from the common trend cahy is a proxy for the consumption-wealth ratio that should...

Using the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we provide evidence that consumers' beliefs about current and future aggregate durable expenditure predict expected returns. We rationalize this finding through an asset pricing model with recursive preferences over non-durable and durable goods and belief...

Using a measure of local long-run growth prospects, I uncover a novel link between economic fundamentals and prices of a segmented asset class, housing. While excess housing returns are positively associated with the level of growth prospects, housing valuations (price-to-rent ratios) are...

Using a macro quantile factor model, we examine cross-state (i.e., cross-quantile) heterogeneity in consumption behaviors. We find that common macro factors generate a “big bang/crunch” effect on micro consumption. Generally speaking, when the aggregate effect of the common factors on the...

Using information in returns we identify the stochastic process of consumption – the crucial ingredient of most macro-finance models. We find that aggregate consumption reacts over multiple quarters to innovations spanned by financial markets, and this persistent component accounts for 26% of...

This paper shows that consumption-based asset pricing puzzles arise from using globally concave-shaped consumption utility. We empirically find that asset returns correlate negatively with many individuals' low-quantile consumption growth. This finding challenges most mainstream models and...