Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price....

In this paper, I first show that liquid assets make risk-averse agents better off by eliminating multiple equilibria and thus eliminating speculation based on nonfundamentals. I then show that illiquid assets make risk-averse agents worse off by enlarging the set of economies (or agent...

Even if an asset has no fundamental uncertainty with a constant dividend process, a stochastic sentiment-driven equilibrium for the asset price exists besides the well-known unique fundamental equilibrium. Our paper constructs such sentiment-driven equilibria under general utility functions...

We solve and test experimentally a global-games model of speculative attacks where agents can choose whether to read, at a cost, a payoff irrelevant (sunspot) announcement. Assuming that subjects exogenously believe some others to follow sunspots, we provide conditions for a unique equilibrium...

The Great Recession seems to be creating a change in the trend of macroeconomic thinking. Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models dominated the macroeconomics literature without any apparent challengers on the horizon. Since then, however, we...

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that...

This article presents structural asset pricing model with stochastic interest rate and default barrier based on the evolution of the firm' Earning Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT). This framework is further enhanced by the game theory analysis which examines the negotiation between shareholders...

Banks hold liquid and illiquid assets. An illiquid bank that receives a liquidity shock sells assets to liquid banks in exchange for cash. We characterize the constrained efficient allocation as the solution to a planner's problem and show that the market equilibrium is constrained inefficient,...

This paper investigates how the asset-return variance risk premium changes leverage. I find that the premium lowers leverage by increasing risk-neutral bankruptcy probability and costs in a model where asset returns have stochastic variance with risk premium. Empirically, the model calibrations...

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...