We provide a critical theoretical and empirical analysis that suggests a key driver of fiscal effects on equity markets is the Federal Reserve. For the Post-1980 era, tax cuts lead to higher cash flow news and higher discount rates. The discount rate news tends to dominate such that tax cuts are...

How fiscal policy impacts equity and bond returns is an open question. Unlike previous studies, we address this issue in a way that decomposes current returns into news about cash flows and news about discount rates. Moreover, we use narrative methods to identify plausibly exogenous shocks to...

We study the link between timing of cash flows and expected returns in general equilibrium production economies. Our model incorporates (i) heterogenous exposure to aggregate pro- ductivity shocks across capital vintages, and (ii) an endogenous stock of growth options. Our economy features a...

In this study I examine the welfare implications of monetary policy by constructing a novel New Keynesian model that properly accounts for asset pricing facts. I find that the Ramsey optimal monetary policy yields an inflation rate above 3.5% and inflation volatility close to 1.5%. The same...

The key insight from this analysis is that monetary policy should be responding more to negative shocks than positive shocks: optimal monetary policy is asymmetric. Moreover, if we take the stance that asset prices indicate a high cost of exposure to long-run risks, this has very interesting...

We empirically document that serial uncertainty shocks are (1) common in the data and (2) have an increasingly stronger impact on the macroeconomy. In other words, a series of bad (positive) uncertainty shocks exacerbates the economic decline significantly. From a theoretical perspective, these...