Financial innovation in recent decades has expanded portfolio choice. We investigate how greater choice affects investors' savings and asset returns. We establish a choice channel by which greater portfolio choice increases investors' savings --- by enabling them to earn the aggregate risk...

This paper suggests a novel approach for predicting aggregate stock returns at quarterly and annual frequencies. Weak return predictability is consistent with the view that a stationary component of stock prices is highly persistent. In such cases, expected returns are time-varying but also...

Operating leverage (OL) and profitability are interrelated determinants of stock returns. We show that the outperformance of firms with high OL is driven by periods of unconstrained aggregate funding conditions. Firms with high OL are more risky in general, but when the Fed eases funding...

This paper empirically examines the effects of industrial and geographic innovations on firm-level profitability and stock returns due to spillovers. Using the data of U.S. patents and patent inventors, we propose empirical proxies for industrial and geographic spillovers and find a positive...

This paper evidences the explanatory power of managers' uncertainty for cross-sectional stock returns. I introduce a novel measure of the degree of managers' uncertain beliefs about future states: manager uncertainty (MU), defined as the count of the word “uncertainty” over the sum of the...

The goal of this paper is to show that household-level financial distress (FD) varies greatly, meaning there is unequal exposure to macroeconomic risk, and that FD can increase macroeconomic vulnerability. To do this, we first establish three facts: (i) regions in the U.S. vary significantly in...

This article addresses the issue concerning the application of Regulation (EU) 1286/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 November 2014 “on key information documents for packaged retail and insurance based investment products (PRIIPs)” in relation to callable corporate...

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in continuous time. My generalized framework accommodates jumps and heterogeneous recursive preferences. I show that countercyclical cross-sectional risk is irrelevant to risk premia if and only if all...

Changes in credit supply induce large and frequent variations in households' access to unsecured debt. They generate a novel financial precautionary motive, which compounds the classical motive associated with idiosyncratic income risk, as borrowers accumulate risk-free bonds to hedge against...

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...