I estimate welfare benefits of eliminating idiosyncratic consumption shocks unrelated to the business cycle as 47.3% of household utility and benefits of eliminating idiosyncratic shocks related to the business cycle as 3.4% of utility. Estimates of the former substantially exceed earlier ones...

Habit persistence in consumption preferences and durability of consumption goods are two hypotheses which imply time-nonseparability in the derived utility for consumption expenditures. We study a simple model with both effects, in which lagged consumption expenditures enter the Euler equation....

The optimal portfolio of a utility-maximizing investor trading in the S&P 500 index and cash, subject to proportional transaction costs, becomes stochastically dominated when overlaid with a zero-net-cost portfolio of S&P 500 options bought at their ask and written at their bid price in most...

We present evidence that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and drive asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences. A single state variable drives the conditional cross-sectional...

A novel methodology in testing the long-run risks model of Bansal and Yaron (2004) is presented based on the observation that, under the null, the potentially latent state variables, "long-run risk" and the conditional variance of its innovation, are known a¢ ne functions of the observable...

The puzzle that the market-wide price-dividend ratio predicts neither the market return nor dividend growth in linear regressions is addressed in an equilibrium model with two regimes where the process of the conditional mean of dividend growth is more predictable in one regime than in the...

The mean, covariability, and predictability of the return of different classes of financial assets challenge the rational economic model for an explanation. The unconditional mean aggregate equity premium is almost seven percent per year and remains high after adjusting downwards the sample mean...

By applying stochastic dominance arguments, upper bounds on the reservation write price of calls and puts and lower bounds on the reservation purchase price of these derivatives are derived in the presence of proportional transaction costs incurred in trading the underlying security. The primary...

The Euler equations of consumption are tested on the household consumption of non-durables and services, reconstructed from the CEX database. The estimated relative risk aversion coefficient of the representative household decreases, and the estimated unexplained mean equity premium decreases,...

The observed discrepancies of derivative prices from their theoretical, arbitrage-free values are examined in the presence of proportional transaction costs. Analytic upper and lower bounds on the reservation write and purchase prices, respectively, are obtained when an investor's preferences...