A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...

The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly disrupted the economy. This paper attempts to quantify the macroeconomic impact of costly and deadly disasters in recent US history, and to translate these estimates into an analysis of the likely impact of COVID-19. A costly disaster series is...

It is well known that the covariance structure of the data alone is not enough to identify an SVAR, and the conventional approach is to impose restrictions on the parameters of the model based on a priori theoretical considerations. This paper suggests that much can be gained by requiring the...

This paper combines a data rich environment with a machine learning algorithm to provide new estimates of time-varying systematic expectational errors ("belief distortions") embedded in survey responses. We find that distortions are large even for professional forecasters, with all...

Uncertainty about the future rises in recessions. But is uncertainty a source of business cycles or an endogenous response to them, and does the type of uncertainty matter? We propose a novel SVAR identification strategy to address these questions via inequality constraints on the structural...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of portfolios of active mutual funds, ETFs and hedge funds through the lens of risk (anomaly) factors. We show that that these funds do not systematically tilt their portfolios towards profitable factors, such as high book-to-market (BM) ratios, high...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

The U.S. economy is characterized by large, longer term regime shifts in asset values relative to macroeconomic fundamentals. These movements coincide with shifts in the real federal funds rate in excess of a measure of the natural rate of interest, and in equity market return premia. We specify...

We investigate a consumption-based present value relation that is a function of future dividend growth. Using data on aggregate consumption and measures of the dividend payments from aggregate wealth, we show that changing forecasts of dividend growth make an important contribution to...

Why do stocks rise and fall? From the beginning of 1989 to the end of 2017, $34 trillion of real equity wealth (2017:Q4 dollars) was created by the U.S. corporate sector. We estimate that 43% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating...