In this study I examine the welfare implications of monetary policy by constructing a novel New Keynesian model that properly accounts for asset pricing facts. I find that the Ramsey optimal monetary policy yields an inflation rate above 3.5% and inflation volatility close to 1.5%. The same...

We zero in on the expected returns of long-short portfolios based on 120 stock market anomalies by accounting for (1) effective bid-ask spreads, (2) post-publication effects, and (3) the modern era of trading technology that began in the early 2000s. Net of these effects, the average anomaly's...

We study the asset pricing implications of a general equilibrium Lucas endowment economy inhabited by two agents with habit formation preferences. Preferences are modeled either as internal or external habits. We allow for agents' heterogeneity in relative risk aversion and habit strength. We...

We find that firm-level variance risk premium, estimated as the difference between option-implied and expected variances, has a prominent explanatory power for credit spreads in the presence of market- and firm-level risk control variables identified in the existing literature. Such a...

Treasury securities normally possess unparalleled safety and liquidity and, consequently, carry a money premium. We use recent debt limit impasses, which temporarily increased the riskiness of Treasuries, to investigate the relationship between the money premium, safety, and liquidity. Our...

This paper measures the probability of rare disasters by measuring the probability of the intermeeting federal funds rate cuts they provoke. Differentiating between months with Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings and months without identifies excess returns on federal funds futures...

It has been documented that an increase in the demand for safe assets induces the private sector to create more money-like claims. Focusing on private repos backed by U.S. Treasury securities, I show that an increase in the demand for safe assets leads to a decreases in the issuance of Treasury...

In this paper we estimate the value of the embedded option in U.S. Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS). The option value exhibits significant time variation that is correlated with periods of deflationary expectations. We use our estimated option values to construct an embedded option...

This paper reports on tail risk premiums in two tail risk hedging strategies: the S&P 500 puts and the VIX calls. As a new measure of tail risk, we suggest using a model-free, risk-neutral measure of the volatility of volatility implied by a cross section of the VIX options, which we call the...

Many theories of asset prices assume time-varying uncertainty in order to generate time-varying risk premia. This paper generates time-varying uncertainty endogenously, through precautionary saving dynamics. Precautionary motives prescribe that, in bad times, next period's consumption should be...