Most of the theoretical work in the news shock literature abstracts away from structural explanations, assuming instead that news is a pure signal giving agents advance notice that aggregate technology will undergo exogenous change at some future point. This paper proposes that a surprise...

We study the effects of changes in uncertainty about future fiscal policy on aggregate economic activity. Fiscal deficits and public debt have risen sharply in the wake of the financial crisis. While these developments make fiscal consolidation inevitable, there is considerable uncertainty about...

This paper argues that a specification of stochastic volatility commonly used to analyze the Great Moderation in DSGE models may not be appropriate, because the level of a process with this specification does not have conditional or unconditional moments. This is unfortunate because agents may...

We propose a novel method to estimate dynamic equilibrium models with stochastic volatility. First, we characterize the properties of the solution to this class of models. Second, we take advantage of the results about the structure of the solution to build a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to...

We use intraday data to compute weekly realized variance, skewness, and kurtosis for equity returns and study the realized moments' time-series and cross-sectional properties. We investigate if this week's realized moments are informative for the cross-section of next week's stock returns. We...

We document strong U.S. stock and bond return predictability from several macroeconomic volatility series before 1982. Return predictability declined significantly during the Great Moderation in the post-1982 sample. Our empirical finding is robust to out-of-sample "real time" forecasts in terms...

Previous studies use cross-sectional forecast dispersion in examining the relation between forecast dispersion and future stock returns and report an anomalous negative dispersion-return relation. This paper examines how time-series forecast dispersion is distinct in the relation to stock...

We provide evidence suggesting that the assumption on the probability distribution for return innovations is more influential for Value at Risk (VaR) performance than the conditional volatility specification. We also show that some recently proposed asymmetric probability distributions and the...

This paper investigates the relationships among cross-sectional stock returns and analysts' forecast revisions, forecast dispersion and momentum. Market rewards the strategy in pursuit of revision up and away from revision down by 22.7% per annum over the 1983-2015 periods. I find that the...