We analyse the Pareto optimal contracts between lenders and borrowers in a model with asymmetric information. The model is a generalization of the Rothschild-Stiglitz pure adverse selection problem to include moral hazard with limited liability contracts. Entrepreneurs with unequal ``abilities"...

In an economy where entrepreneurs with unequal ‘abilities’ face alternative investment projects, which differ in their degree of risk and productivity, we analyse the Nash equilibrium contracts arising from a banks-borrowers game in the context of asymmetric information. We show that, for a...

Survey respondents strongly disagree about return risks and, increasingly, macroeconomic uncertainty. This may have contributed to higher asset prices through increased use of collateralisation, which allows risk-neutral investors to realise perceived gains from trade. Investors with lower risk...

Existing literature continues to be unable to offer a convincing explanation for the volatility of the stochastic discount factor in real world data. Our work provides such an explanation. We do not rely on frictions, market incompleteness or transactions costs of any kind. Instead, we modify a...

We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event, not present in the usual post-war sample data, but not rationally excludable from the set of possibilities – the peso problem – can affect the behaviour of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To that...

We document a strong co-movement between the VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, and monetary policy. We decompose the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility ("uncertainty"), and analyze their dynamic interactions with monetary...

This paper studies the pricing of financial assets in a complete general equilibrium set-up. We begin with an asset pricing model à la Lucas grafted on a standard Real Business Cycles model. We provide a new decentralized interpretation of such a model in which firms make meaningful investment...

Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

This Paper studies whether the consumption-based asset-pricing model can explain the cross-section of Sharpe ratios. The constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) model and several extensions (habit persistence, recursive utility and idiosyncratic shocks) all imply that the Sharpe ratio is linearly...