We study a general class of consumption-savings problems with recursive preferences. We characterize the sign of the consumption response to arbitrary shocks in terms of the product of two sufficient statistics: the elasticity of intertemporal substitution between contemporaneous consumption and...

We study daily money market mutual fund flows at the individual share class level during the crisis of September 2008. The empirical approach that we apply to this fine granularity of data brings new insights into the investor and portfolio holding characteristics that are conducive to run-risk...

We study daily money market mutual fund flows at the individual share class level during September 2008. This fine granularity of data facilitates new insights into investor and portfolio holding characteristics conducive to run risk in cash-like asset pools. Empirically, we find that...

We study investor redemptions and portfolio rebalancing decisions of prime money market mutual funds (MMFs) during the Eurozone crisis. We find that sophisticated investors selectively acquire information about MMFs' risk exposures to Europe, which leads managers to withdraw funding from...

The strongest predictor of changes in the Fed Funds rate in the period 1982–2008 was the layoff rate. That fact is puzzling from the perspective of representative-agent models of the economy, which imply that the welfare gains of stabilizing employment fluctuations are small. This paper...

We define the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) for general recursive preferences and identify sharp comparative statics from a general dynamic portfolio choice problem. In many cases, when preferences are homothetic, if EIS is smaller (larger) than 1, an investor will decrease...

Are market experts prone to heuristics, and if so, do they transfer across closely related domains --- buying and selling? We investigate this question using a unique dataset of institutional investors with portfolios averaging $573 million. A striking finding emerges: while there is clear...

For many benchmark predictor variables, short-horizon return predictability in the U.S. stock market is local in time as short periods with significant predictability (‘pockets') are interspersed with long periods with little or no evidence of return predictability. We document this result...

This paper proposes state-dependent, idiosyncratic tail risk as a key driver of asset prices. I provide new evidence on the importance of tail events in explaining the shape of the idiosyncratic distribution of income growth rates and its evolution over time. I then formalize its role within a...