Expected returns vary when investors face time-varying investment opportunities. Longrun risk models (Bansal and Yaron 2004) and no-arbitrage affine models (Duffie, Pan, and Singleton 2000) emphasize sources of risk that are not observable to the econometrician. We show that, for both classes of...

This essay looks at the bidirectional relationship between financial history and financial economics. It begins by giving a brief history of financial economics by outlining the main topics of interest to financial economists. It then documents and explains the increasing influence of financial...

Recent findings on the term structure of equity and bond yields pose serious challenges to existing models of equilibrium asset pricing. This paper presents a new equilibrium model of subjective expectations to explain the joint historical dynamics of equity and bond yields (and their yield...

Cross-sectional asset pricing tests with GMM can generate spuriouslyhigh explanatory power for factor models when the moment conditions are specifiedsuch that they allow the estimated factor means to substantially deviate from theobserved sample averages. In fact, by shifting the weights on the...

Equilibrium bond-pricing models rely on inflation being bad news for future growth to generate upward-sloping nominal yield curves. We develop a model that can generate upward-sloping nominal and real yield curves by instead using ambiguity about inflation and growth. Ambiguity can help resolve...

Some key features in the historical dynamics of U.S. Treasury bond yields-a trend in long-term yields, business cycle movements in short-term yields, and a level shift in yield spreads-pose serious challenges to existing equilibrium asset pricing models. This paper presents a new equilibrium...

We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sixth assessment report. We find that this approach provides economic support for the...

We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the "implementable efficient frontier." While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading...

Option prices embed predictive content for the outcomes of pending mergers and acquisitions. This is particularly important in merger arbitrage, where deal failure is a key risk. In this paper, I propose a dynamic asset pricing model that exploits the joint information in target stock and option...

Most central banks effect changes to their target or policy rate in discrete increments (e.g., multiples of 0.25%) following public announcements on scheduled dates. Still, for most applications, researchers rely on the assumption that the policy rate changes linearly with economic conditions...