"This paper incorporates a time-varying intensity of disasters in the Rietz-Barro hypothesis that risk premia result from the possibility of rare, large disasters. During a disaster, an asset's fundamental value falls by a time-varying amount. This in turn generates time-varying risk premia and...

This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level fluctuations can explain an important part of aggregate shocks, and provide a microfoundation for aggregate productivity shocks. Existing research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, arguing that individual firm...

This paper incorporates a time-varying intensity of disasters in the Rietz-Barro hypothesis that risk premia result from the possibility of rare, large disasters. During a disaster, an asset's fundamental value falls by a time-varying amount. This in turn generates time-varying risk premia and...

We study the cascading dynamics immediately before and immediately after 219 market shocks. We define the time of a market shock T_{c} to be the time for which the market volatility V(T_{c}) has a peak that exceeds a predetermined threshold. The cascade of high volatility "aftershocks" triggered...