Leverage asset pricing

We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing factor, is shown to perform well in time series and cross-sectional tests of a wide variety of equity and bond portfolios. The model outperforms alternative specifications of intermediary pricing models that use intermediary net worth as a state variable, and it performs well in comparison to benchmark asset pricing models. We draw implications for macroeconomic modeling.