We study the asset-pricing implications of changes in the variety of consumption goods which happens through free entry and exit of firms. Fluctuations in varieties drive a wedge between the measured and model-based (including variety growth) consumer price index making the pricing kernel as...

We find that high macroeconomic uncertainty is associated with greater accumulation of physical capital, despite a reduction in investment and valuations. To reconcile this puzzling evidence, we show that uncertainty predicts lower depreciation and utilization of existing capital, which...

I develop a stochastic growth model with production where there is a hidden state governing productivity growth regimes, and the hidden state evolves according to a Markov chain. Economic agents learn about the hidden state and display ambiguity aversion in the spirit of Klibanoff et al. (2005)....

We propose a novel one-sector stochastic growth model, where producitivity growth follows a Markov-switching process with two regimes, and where households have generalized recursive smooth ambiguity preferences. The adopted class of preferences permits a three-way separation of risk aversion,...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

This short paper shows that a New Keynesian model with limited asset market participation can generate a high risk-premium on unlevered equity relative to short-term risk-free bonds and high variability of equity returns driven by monetary policy shocks with zero persistence.

We document the empirical fact that asset prices in the consumption-goods and investment-goods sector behave almost identically in the US economy. In order to derive the cyclical behavior of the equity returns in these two sectors, we consider a standard two-sector real-business cycle model with...

We present data from the Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the increased earnings (labor income) inequality, in combination with increased stockmarket participation, has roughly doubled stockholders' share of aggregate labor income in the last four decades. We explore the impact of the...

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the riskfree rate puzzle and the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are in fact...

Since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began announcing its policy decisions in 1994, U.S. stock returns have on average been more than thirty times larger on announcement days than on other days. Surprisingly, these abnormal returns are accrued before the policy announcement. The excess...