We study the asset pricing implications of a multi-agent endowment economy where agents can default on contracts that would leave them otherwise worse off. We specialize and extend the environment studied by Kocherlakota (1995) and Kehoe and Levine (1993) to make it comparable to standard...

We derive a lower bound for the size of the permanent component of asset pricing kernels. The bound is based on return properties of long-term zero-coupon bonds, risk-free bonds, and other risky securities. We find the permanent component of the pricing kernel to be very large; its volatility is...

We propose a method to measure the welfare cost of economic fluctuations that does not require full specification of consumer preferences and instead uses asset prices. The method is based on the marginal cost of consumption fluctuations, the per unit benefit of a marginal reduction in...

We study the asset pricing implications of a multi-agent endowment economy where agents can default on contracts that would leave them otherwise worse off. We specialize and extend the environment studied by Kocherlakota (1995) and Kehoe and Levine (1993) to make it comparable to standard...

We measure the cost of consumption fluctuations using an approach that does not require the specification of preferences and instead uses asset prices. We measure the marginal cost of consumption fluctuations, the per unit benefit of a marginal reduction in consumption fluctuations expressed as...