I review the literature on financial speculation driven by belief disagreements from a macroeconomics perspective. To highlight unifying themes, I develop a stylized macroeconomic model that embeds several mechanisms. With short-selling constraints, speculation can generate overvaluation and...

The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare many preexisting conditions of modern society. Besides the obvious lack of pandemic preparedness, these include biodiversity loss, air pollution, supply chain vulnerabilities, and inequality, to name a few – all systemic risks that threaten the health and...

The goal of this paper is to show that household-level financial distress (FD) varies greatly, meaning there is unequal exposure to macroeconomic risk, and that FD can increase macroeconomic vulnerability. To do this, we first establish three facts: (i) regions in the U.S. vary significantly in...

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used to intermediate the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the...

During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...

Using a new dataset for the German market, this article analyses whether modeling time-varying stochastic discount factor parameters in the CAPM of Sharpe (1964), the HCAPM of Jagannathan and Wang (1996) and the CCAPM of Lucas (1978) can help to explain the cross-section of book-to-market, size...

After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

A major research initiative in finance focuses on the determinants of the cross-sectional and time series properties of asset returns. With that objective in mind, asset pricing models have been developed, starting with the capital asset pricing models of Sharpe (1964), Lintner (1965), and...

This paper extends the methodology developed in Chien, Cole and Lustig (2011 & 2012) (hereafter CCL2011 and CCL2012, respectively) to analyze and compute the equilibria of economies with heterogeneous agents who have different asset trading technologies and are subject to both aggregate and...

The last 15 years has brought forth an explosion of research on consumption-based asset pricing as a leading contender for explaining aggregate stock market behavior. This research has propelled further interest in consumption-based asset pricing, as well as some debate. This chapter surveys the...