This article evaluates a large collection of systemic risk measures based on their ability to predict macroeconomic downturns. We evaluate 19 measures of systemic risk in the US and Europe spanning several decades. We propose dimension reduction estimators for constructing systemic risk indexes...

We provide the first direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We find that very long-run discount rates are low, much lower than implied by most economic theory. We estimate these discount...

We show that the stock market downturns of 2000–2002 and 2007–2009 have very different proximate causes. The early 2000s saw a large increase in the discount rates applied to profits by rational investors, while the late 2000s saw a decrease in rational expectations of future...

In many affine asset pricing models, the innovation to the pricing kernel is a function of innovations to current and expected future values of an economic state variable, often consumption growth, aggregate market returns, or short-term interest rates. The impulse response of the priced state...

Purely technological factors can be a fundamental force behind the emergence of asset price bubbles in developed economies. We analyze an economy in which the production technology utilizes both physical and intangible capital, where the latter cannot be used as collateral for borrowing....

We analyze an overlapping generations economy with financial frictions and accumulation of both physical and intangible capital. The key difference between them is that intangible capital cannot be used as collateral for borrowing. As intangibles become more important in production, financial...