Austerity measures are frequently enacted when the sustainability of public finances is in doubt. Such doubts are reflected in high sovereign yield spreads and put further strain on government finances. Is austerity successful in restoring market confidence, bringing about a reduction in yield...

This paper investigates the transmission of uncertainty about the state of government finances on economic activity. I first employ a data-rich approach to extract a novel proxy that captures uncertainty surrounding the public finances of the Spanish economy, to which I refer as sovereign...

In this paper, we study the relationship between income inequality and stock market returns. We develop a quantitative general equilibrium model that links shifts in both labour and capital income inequality to stock market variables. An increase of the share of capital owners' income from risky...

The price-rent ratio in commercial real estate is highly volatile, and its variation comoves with the business cycle. To account for these two facts, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that explicitly introduces a rental market and incorporates the liquidity constraint on an...

We present data from the Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the increased earnings (labor income) inequality, in combination with increased stockmarket participation, has roughly doubled stockholders' share of aggregate labor income in the last four decades. We explore the impact of the...

The paper explores whether the co-movement of market returns and equity fund flows can be explained by a common response to macroeconomic news. I find that variables that predict the real economy as well as the equity premium are related to mutual fund flows. Changes in dividend-price ratio...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

According to standard theory, wealth should have no intrinsic value. Yet, conventional wisdom, recent theories, and data suggest it might. We verify whether or not households have direct preferences over wealth in selecting assets. The fully structural econometric model focuses on a multivariate...

We study the consumption based asset pricing model due to Lucas (1978). The exogenous endowment sequence is modeled as a linear stochastic process driven by stable shocks in an otherwise standard framework. The Gaussian process emerges as a special case. We derive exact analytical solutions for...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...