We inject aggregate uncertainty - risk and ambiguity - into an otherwise standard business cycle model and describe its consequences. We find that increases in uncertainty generally reduce consumption, but they do not account, in this model, for either the magnitude or the persistence of the...

Long-run asset-pricing restrictions in a macro term-structure model identify discretionary monetary policy separately from a policy rule. We find that policy discretion is an important contributor to aggregate risk. In addition, discretionary easing coincides with good news about the...

Prices of riskfree bonds in any arbitrage-free environment are governed by a pricing kernel: given a kernel, we can compute prices of bonds of any maturity we like. We use observed prices of multi-period bonds to estimate, in a log-linear theoretical setting, the pricing kernel that gave rise to...

Identi fication problems arise naturally in forward-looking models when agents observe more than economists. We illustrate the problem in several macro- finance models with Taylor rules. When the shock to the rule is observed by agents but not economists, identifi cation of the rule's parameters...

Identification problems arise in New Keynesian and macro-finance models when the Taylor rule includes both responses to observable variables like inflation and output, and a shock unseen by economists. Identification of the rule's parameters requires additional restrictions on this unobserved...

We investigate markets for defaultable sovereign debt in which even though there are many identical lenders and symmetric information (including no hidden actions), perfect competition does not obtain. When a private lender allows a sovereign country to increase its level of indebtedness, that...

Extreme market outcomes are often followed by a lack of liquidity and a lack of trade. This market collapse seems particularly acute for markets where traders rely heavily on a specific empirical model such as in derivative markets. Asset pricing and trading, in these cases, are intrinsically...

We explore the bond-pricing implications of an exchange economy where (i) preference shocks result in time-varying term premiums in real yields, and (ii) a monetary policy Taylor rule determines inflation and nominal term premiums. A calibrated version of the model matches the observed term...