Recent research documents that aggregate stock prices are driven by shocks with persistence levels ranging from daily intervals to several decades. Building on these insights, we introduce a parsimonious equilibrium model in which regime-shifts of heterogeneous durations affect the volatility of...

This paper proposes that equilibrium valuation is a powerful method to generate endogenous jumps in asset prices, which provides a structural alternative to traditional reduced-form specifications with exogenous discontinuities. We specify an economy with continuous consumption and dividend...

This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth and income of the entire population of Sweden. The analysis focuses on two main sources of inefficiency in the financial portfolio: underdiversification of risky...

This paper constructs an index of financial sophistication that, in comprehensive data on Swedish households, best explains a set of three investment mistakes: underdiversification, risky share inertia, and the tendency to sell winning stocks and hold losing stocks (the disposition effect). The...

We propose a discrete-time stochastic volatility model in which regime switching serves three purposes. First, changes in regimes capture low frequency variations, which is their traditional role. Second, they specify intermediate frequency dynamics that are usually assigned to smooth...

This paper investigates the dynamics of individual portfolios in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth of all households in Sweden. Between 1999 and 2002, we observe little aggregate rebalancing in the financial portfolio of participants. These patterns conceal strong...

We implement a multifrequency volatility decomposition of three exchange rates and show that components with similar durations are strongly correlated across series. This motivates a bivariate extension of the Markov-Switching Multifractal (MSM) introduced in Calvet and Fisher (2001, 2004)....

How do public and private information affect equilibrium allocations and social welfare in economies with investment complementarities? And what is the optimal transparency in the information conveyed, for example, by economic statistics, policy announcements, or news in the media? We first...

Bigger governments raise the possibilities for corruption; more corruption may in turn raise the support for redistributive policies that intend to correct the inequality and injustice generated by corruption. We formalize these insights in a simple dynamic model. A positive feedback from past...

The arrival of new, unfamiliar, investment opportunities is often associated with "exuberant" movements in asset prices and real economic activity. During these episodes of high uncertainty, financial markets look at the real sector for signals about the profitability of the new investment...