We find that on average, an announcement of rising unemployment is good news for stocks during economic expansions and bad news during economic contractions. Unemployment news bundles three types of primitive information relevant for valuing stocks: information about future interest rates, the...

There is a large body of literature that concludes that-when confronted with increased competition-banks rationally choose more risky portfolios. We argue that this literature has had a significant influence on regulators and central bankers. We review the empirical literature and conclude that...

Knowledge of the one-month interest rate is useful in forecasting the sign, as well as the variance, of the excess return on stocks. The services of a portfolio manager who makes use of the forecasting model to shift funds between bills and stocks would be worth an annual management fee of 2...

Green and Hollifield (1992) argue that the presence of a dominant factor would result in extreme negative weights in mean-variance efficient portfolios even in the absence of estimation errors. In that case, imposing no-short-sale constraints should hurt, whereas empirical evidence is often to...

The stochastic discount factor (SDF) method provides a unified general framework for econometric analysis of asset-pricing models. There have been concerns that, compared to the classical beta method, the generality of the SDF method comes at the cost of efficiency in parameter estimation and...

When consumption betas of stocks are computed using year-over-year consumption growth based upon the fourth quarter, the consumption-based asset pricing model (CCAPM) explains the cross-section of stock returns as well as the <link rid="b25">Fama and French (1993)</link> three-factor model. The CCAPM's performance...

In this article, the authors develop alternative ways to compare asset pricing models when it is understood that their implied stochastic discount factors do not price all portfolios correctly. Unlike comparisons based on chi square statistics associated with null hypotheses that models are...