Empirical results based on two different statistical approaches lead to several conclusions about the role of time-varying asset risk assessments in accounting for what, on the basis of many earlier studies, appear to be time-varying differentials in ex ante asset returns. First, both methods...

The observed reluctance of most individuals in the United States to buy individual life annuities, and the concomitant approximately flat average age-wealth profile, stand in sharp contradiction to the standard life cycle model of consumption-saving behavior. The analysis in this paper lends...

The fact that most eldealy individuals in the United States choose to maintain a flat age-wealth profile, rather than buy individual life annuities, stands in contrast to central implications of the standard life-cycle model of consumption-saving behavior. The analysis in this paper lends...

The three sections of this paper support three related conclusions. First, asset demands with the familiar properties of wealth homogeneity and linearity in expected returns follow as close approximations from expected utility maximizing behavior under the assumptions of constant relative risk...

Short-term interest rates in the United States have been "too high" since October 1979 in the sense that both unconditional and conditional forecasts, based on an estimated vector autoregression model summarizing the prior experience,under predict short-term interest rates during this period....

This paper summarizes some recent work in which we have modeled long-term interest rate determination in an explicit demand-supply context, using multi-equation structural models and directly contrasts such models with unrestricted reduced-form models. Wholly apart from questions of...

This paper develops behavioral relationships explaining investors' demands for long-term bonds, using three alternative hypotheses about investors' expectations of future bond prices (yields). The results, based on U.S. 'data for six major categories of bond market investors, consistently...

Among the numerous familiar sets of specific assumptions sufficient to derive mean-variance portfolio behavior from more general expected utility maximization in continuous time, the assumptions of constant relative risk aversion and joint normally distributed asset return assessments are also...

This paper derives an estimation procedure which, when the same distributed lag appears twice in an equation to be estimated by least-squares regression, identifies all of the relevant coefficients and lag weights and also constrains the two sets of individual lag weights to be identical. The...

Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; today this process involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In...