Many applications in financial economics use data series with different starting or ending dates. This paper describes estimation methods, based on the generalized method of moments (GMM), which make use of all available data for each moment condition. We introduce two asymptotically equivalent...

In U.S. data, value stocks have higher expected excess returns and higher CAPM alphas than growth stocks. We find the external-habit model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) can generate a value premium in both CAPM alpha and expected excess return so long as the persistence of the log...

A large recent literature has focused on multiperiod portfolio choice with labor income, and while the models are elaborate along several dimensions, they all assume that the joint distribution of shocks to labor income and asset returns is i.i.d.. Calibrating this joint distribution to U.S....

The seminal work of Constantinides (1986) documents how, when the risky return is calibrated to the U.S. market return, the impact of transaction costs on per-annum liquidity premia is an order of magnitude smaller than the cost rate itself. A number of recent papers have formed portfolios...

We develop a new methodology that allows conditional performance to be a function of information available at the start of the performance period but does not make assumptions about the behavior of the conditional betas. We use econometric techniques developed by Lynch and Wachter (2011) that...

A growing literature shows that credit indicators forecast aggregate real outcomes. While researchers have proposed various explanations, the economic mechanism behind these results remains an open question. In this paper, we show that a simple, frictionless, model explains empirical findings...

We investigate whether a model with a time-varying probability of economic disaster can explain the pricing of collateralized debt obligations, both prior to and during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Namely, we examine the pricing of tranches on the CDX, an index of credit default swaps on...

We solve for asset prices in a general affine representative-agent economy with isoelastic recursive utility and rare events. Our novel solution method is exact in two special cases: no preference for early resolution of uncertainty and elasticity of intertemporal substitution equal to one. Our...

Large crises tend to follow rapid credit expansions. Causality, however, is far from obvious. We show how this pattern arises naturally when financial intermediaries optimally exploit economic rents that drive their franchise value. As this franchise value fluctuates over the business cycle, so...

This paper evaluates skewness in the cross-section of stock returns in light of predictions from a well-known class of models. Cross-sectional skewness in monthly returns far exceeds what the standard lognormal model of returns would predict. However, skewness in long-run returns substantially...