This chapter surveys the literature on fixed-income pricing models, including dynamic term-structure models, and interest-rate sensitive, derivative pricing models. Our overview of conceptual approaches highlights the tradeoffs that have emerged between the complexity of the probability model...

The area of derivatives is arguably the most fascinating area within financial economics during the past thirty years. This chapter reviews the evolution of derivatives contract markets and derivatives research over the past thirty years. The chapter has six complementary sections. The first...

Behavioral finance argues that some financial phenomena can plausibly be understood using models in which some agents are not fully rational. The field has two building blocks: limits to arbitrage , which argues that it can be difficult for rational traders to undo the dislocations caused by...

Market microstructure and asset pricing both consider the behavior and formation of prices in asset markets. Yet neither literature explicitly recognizes the importance and role of the factors so crucial to the other approach. This survey seeks to join the two literatures by surveying the work...

We review the international finance literature to assess the extent to which international factors affect financial asset demands and prices. International asset-pricing models with mean-variance investors predict that an asset's risk premium depends on its covariance with the world market...

Anomalies are empirical results that seem to be inconsistent with maintained theories of asset-pricing behavior. They indicate either market inefficiency (profit opportunities) or inadequacies in the underlying asset-pricing model. After they are documented and analyzed in the academic...

This paper is a critical review of the literature on the “equity premium puzzle≓. The puzzle, as originally articulated more than fifteen years ago, underscored the inability of the standard paradigm of Economics and Finance to explain the magnitude of the risk premium, that is, the return...

This chapter reviews the behavior of financial asset prices in relation to consumption. The chapter lists some important stylized facts that characterize U.S. data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

This is a survey of the basic theoretical foundations of intertemporal asset pricing theory. The broader theory is first reviewed in a simple discrete-time setting, emphasizing the key role of state prices. The existence of state prices is equivalent to the absence of arbitrage. State prices,...