Most central banks effect changes to their target or policy rate in discrete increments (e.g., multiples of 0.25%) following public announcements on scheduled dates. Still, for most applications, researchers rely on the assumption that the policy rate changes linearly with economic conditions...

Progress on the question of whether policymakers should respond directly to financial variables requires a realistic economic model that captures the links between asset prices, credit expansion, and real economic activity. Standard DSGE models with fully-rational expectations have difficulty...

This paper applies a heterogeneous agent asset pricing model, featuring fundamentalists and chartists, to the price-dividend and price-earnings ratios of the S&P500 index. Agents update their beliefs according to macroeconomic information, as an alternative to evolutionary dynamics. For...

We sort currencies into portfolios by countries’ consumption growth over the past year. The excess return of the highest-consumption-growth currency portfolio over the portfolio of lowest-consumption-growth currencies is positive on average, compensating investors for large negative returns...

We compare local and global polynomial solution methods for DSGE models with Epstein- Zin-Weil utility. We show that model implications for macroeconomic quantities are relatively invariant to choice of solution method but that a global method can yield substantial improve- ments for asset...

Macroeconomic models with financial frictions typically imply that the excess return on a well-diversified portfolio of corporate bonds is close to zero. In contrast, the empirical finance literature documents large and time-varying risk premia in the corporate bond market (the "credit spread...

This paper employs a standard asset pricing model to derive theoretical volatility measures in a setting that allows for varying degrees of investor information about the dividend process. We show that the volatility of the price–dividend ratio increases monotonically with investor information...

We examine a trivariate time series model that is subject to a regime switch, where the shifts are governed by an unobserved, two-state variable that follows a Markov process. The analysis is performed in a Bayesian framework developed by Albert and Chib (1993), where the unobserved states are...

This paper attempts to assess the economic significance and implications of collateralization in different financial markets, which is essentially a matter of theoretical justification and empirical verification. We present a comprehensive theoretical framework that allows for collateralization...

This article presents a comprehensive framework for valuing financial instruments subject to credit risk and collateralization. In particular, we focus on the impact of default dependence on asset pricing, as correlated default risk is one of the most pervasive threats to financial markets. Some...