If investors can hedge risk at no cost, then the CAPM should hold period by period (Merton, 1973). That is, the time-t expected return of an asset should be equal to the product of its time-t beta and the time-t market expected return. We empirically test this CAPM relation on equity portfolios....

We study an economy with incomplete information in which two agents are uncertain and disagree about the length of business cycles. That is, the agents do not question whether the economy is growing or not, but instead continuously estimate how long economic cycles will last — i.e., they learn...

We study the impact of model disagreement on the dynamics of asset prices, return volatility, and trade in the market. In our continuous-time framework, two investors have homogeneous preferences and equal access to information, but disagree about the length of the business cycle. We show that...

Persistence risk is an endogenous source of risk that arises when a rational agent learns about the length of business cycles. Persistence risk is positive during recessions and negative during expansions. This asymmetry, which solely results from learning about persistence, causes expected...

We provide empirical evidence that CAPM-betas positively predict asset returns when market returns are predicted to be high, which occurs about every other month. Consequently, the product of beta and the predicted market return (CAPM) predicts asset returns by combining the out-of-sample...

This paper studies the impact of information processing and rational learning about economic fundamentals on the level and timing of risk premium in the cross-section of firms. Learning helps explain the level of the value premium, and why the term structure of risk premium is increasing for...