Mathematical models of bond pricing are used by both academics and Wall Street practitioners, with practitioners introducing time-dependent parameters to fit 'arbitrage-free' models to selected asset prices. The authors show, in a simple one-factor setting, that the ability of such models to...

We derive discrete markov chain approximations for continuous state equilibrium term structure models. The states and transition probabilities of the markov chain are chosen effciently according to a quadrature rule as in Tauchen and Hussey (1991). Quadrature provides a simple yet method which...

Asset pricing implications for business cycle analysis David Backus, Bryan Routledge, and Stanley Zin Although the stochastic growth model has become the benchmark for business cycle analysis, many of its implications for asset prices and returns are grossly counterfactual. For example, the...

We inject aggregate uncertainty — risk and ambiguity — into an otherwise standard business cycle model and describe its consequences. We find that increases in uncertainty generally reduce consumption, but they do not account, in this model, for either the magnitude or the persistence of the...