Recent studies show that volatility-managed equity portfolios realize higher Sharpe ratios than portfolios with a constant notional exposure. We show that this result only holds for “risk assets”, such as equity and credit, and link this to the so-called leverage effect for those assets. In...

In this paper, I provide a structural approach to quantify the forces that govern the joint dynamics of corporate bond credit spreads and equity volatility. I build a dynamic model and estimate a wide array of fundamental shocks using a large firm-level database on credit spreads, equity prices,...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

This paper studies corporate debt structure over the business cycle and its implications for aggregate macroeconomic dynamics. We develop a tractable macro-finance model featuring debt heterogeneity with both secured and unsecured debt. Unlike secured debt, unsecured debt gives the lenders no...

We investigate long-run stock-bond correlation using a model that combines the dynamic conditional correlation model with the mixed-data sampling approach and allows long-run correlation to be affected by macro-finance factors (historical and forecasts). We use macro-finance factors related to...

This paper provides an extensive analysis of the predictive ability of financial volatility measures for economic activity. We construct monthly measures of stock and bond market volatility from daily returns and model volatility as composed of a long-run component that is common across all...

We provide an extensive analysis of the predictive ability of financial volatility for economic activity. We consider monthly measures of realized and implied volatility from the stock and bond markets. In a dynamic factor framework, we extract the common long-run component of volatility that is...

Reforms aimed at reducing the regulatory barriers to firm entry and bolstering greater firm creation have gained significant prominence in economies beyond the U.S. Given these facts and amid growing work on the link between firm creation and cyclical housing-market dynamics, we document a...

More than 20 years of financial market data suggest a term structure of the welfare cost of economic uncertainty that is downward-sloping on average, especially during downturns. This evidence offers guidance in selecting a model to study the benefits of macroeconomic stabilization from a...

We reconsider the empirical links between volatility and growth between 1970 and 2007. There is a strong and significant correlation between individual country growth rates and global factors that are arguably exogenous with respect to their economies. The amount of volatility driven by these...