We study the asset-pricing implications of changes in the variety of consumption goods which happens through free entry and exit of firms. Fluctuations in varieties drive a wedge between the measured and model-based (including variety growth) consumer price index making the pricing kernel as...

This paper uses structural vector autoregressive models (SVARs) to show that the response of US stock prices to fiscal shocks changed in 1980. Over the period 1955-1979, an expansionary spending or revenue shock was associated with higher stock prices. After 1980, the response of stock prices to...

Job search decisions of unemployed workers are forward-looking and respond to expected returns from the search process. When expected returns (or discount rates) are high, the discounted benefits from the search process are low. Thus unemployed workers search less intensively for jobs. We build...

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in continuous time. My generalized framework accommodates jumps and heterogeneous recursive preferences. I show that countercyclical cross-sectional risk is irrelevant to risk premia if and only if all...

We explore the dynamic effects of news about a future technology improvement which turns out ex post to be overoptimistic. We find that it is difficult to generate a boom-bust cycle (a period in which stock prices, consumption, investment and employment all rise and then crash) in response to...