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...

Financial contagion occurs when return and volatility transmit between fundamentally unrelated sectors. Our equilibrium model shows that contagion arises because investors pay fluctuating attention to news. As a negative shock hits one sector, investors pay more attention to it. This raises the...

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...

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 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...

This paper investigates how the stock market reacts to the Federal Reserve's ability to tame inflation through rate hikes. Since investors do not directly observe the speed at which rate hikes reduce inflation, they need to learn about it by observing inflation prints. When investors realize...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First is to extend the notions of an n-dimensional semimartingaleand its stochastic integral to a piecewise semimartingale of stochastic dimension. The propertiesof the former carry over largely intact to the latter, avoiding some of the pitfalls of...

Motivated by the Chinese experience, we analyze a semi-open economy where the centralbank has access to international capital markets, but the private sector has not. Thisenables the central bank to choose an interest rate different from the international rate.We examine the optimal policy of...