Measures of U.S. government policy approval, such as U.S. Presidential or Congressional ratings, are strongly related to persistent fluctuations in the dollar exchange rates. Contemporaneous correlations between approval ratings and the dollar value reach 50% against the advanced economy...

Does macroeconomic uncertainty increase or decrease aggregate growth and asset prices? To address this question, we decompose aggregate uncertainty into ‘good' and ‘bad' volatility components, associated with positive and negative innovations to macroeconomic growth. We document that in line...

High expected inflation is known to have a negative impact on future real growth. We show that this effect is significantly more pronounced in durable relative to non-durable goods sectors of the economy. Consistent with this macroeconomic evidence, the equity returns of durable-goods-producing...

We show novel empirical evidence on the significance of output volatility (vol) shocks for both currency and international quantity dynamics. Focusing on G-17 countries, we document that: (1) consumption and output vols are imperfectly correlated within countries; (2) across countries,...

We show that time-varying volatility of volatility is a significant risk factor which affects the cross-section and the time-series of index and VIX option returns, beyond volatility risk itself. Volatility and volatility-of-volatility measures, identified model-free from the option price data...

We measure "good" and "bad" variance premia that capture risk compensations for the realized variation in positive and negative market returns, respectively. The two variance premium components jointly predict excess returns over the next 1 and 2 years with statistically significant positive...

Risk-neutral probabilities, observable from option prices, combine objective probabilities and risk adjustments across economic states. We consider a recursive-utility framework to separately identify objective probabilities and risk adjustments using only observed market prices. We find that a...

Close-to-zero interest rates challenge standard economic models in which zero lower bound (ZLB) is absent. We estimate a recursive utility model which features time-varying latent expected real growth, expected inflation, and stochastic inflation volatility. Using an approximate solution to bond...

We develop a discrete-time real endowment economy featuring Epstein-Zin recursive utility and a Levy time-change subordinator, which represents a clock that connects business time to calendar time. This setup provides a convenient equilibrium framework for pricing non-Gaussian risks, where the...