This article shows that the "risk premium" shock in Smets and Wouters (2007) can be interpreted as a structural shock to the demand for safe and liquid assets such as short-term US Treasury securities. Several implications of this interpretation are discussed.

This paper studies a dynamic equilibrium model of asset prices in a partially observable exchange economy. It shows that the precautionary savings motive in response to estimation uncertainty can dominate the risk aversion effect, resulting in the reduction of the equity premium over short...

This article shows that the "risk premium" shock in Smets and Wouters (2007) can be interpreted as a structural shock to the demand for safe and liquid assets such as short-term US Treasury securities. Several implications of this interpretation are discussed

Safe asset shortages can expose the economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality of the bond premium. Self-fulfilling liquidity traps are associated with a counter-cyclical bond premium. Small issuances of government debt crowd out private debt and...

Safe asset shortages can expose the economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality of the bond premium. Selfful filling liquidity traps are associated with a counter-cyclical bond premium. Small issuances of government debt crowd out private debt and...

Our paper reexamines whether 29 variables from 26 papers published after Goyal and Welch (2008), as well as the original 17 variables, were useful in predicting the equity premium in-sample and out-of-sample. Our samples include the original periods in which these variables were identified, but...

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used to intermediate the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the...

The seminal Barro (2006) closed-economy model of the equity risk premium in the presence of extreme events ("disasters") allowed for leverage in the form of risky corporate debt which defaulted only in states when the Government defaulted on its debt. The probability of default was therefore...

We introduce a Nelson-Siegel type interest rate term structure model with the underlying yield factors following autoregressive processes revealing time-varying stochastic volatility. The factor volatilities capture risk inherent to the term struc- ture and are associated with the time-varying...