The equity premium, namely the expected return on the aggregate stock market less the government bill rate, is of central importance to the portfolio allocation of individuals, to the investment decisions of firms, and to model calibration and testing. This quantity is usually estimated from the...

Since Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) and Fama and MacBeth (1973), the two-pass cross-sectional regression (CSR) methodology has become the most popular approach for estimating and testing asset pricing models. Statistical inference with this method is typically conducted under the assumption...

This paper uses an intertemporal equilibrium asset pricing model to interpret the cross-sectional pattern of stock and bond returns. The model relates assets' mean returns to their covariances with the contemporaneous return and news about future returns on the market portfolio. In a departure...

If investors are myopic mean-variance optimizers, a stock's expected return is linearly related to its beta in the cross section. The slope of the relation is the cross-sectional price of risk, which should equal the expected equity premium. We use this simple observation to forecast the...

In a two-period Lucas tree economy in which ex ante identical, but ex post dissimilar, agents face undiversifiable labor income risk, calibrating a (wrong) representative agent model results in overstating the equilibrium riskfree rate and in understanding the equilibrium equity premium if the...

We show that volatility movements have first-order implications for consumption dynamics and asset prices. Volatility news affects the stochastic discount factor and carries a separate risk premium. In the data, volatility risks are persistent and are strongly correlated with discount-rate news....

Workhorse Gaussian affine term structure models (ATSMs) attribute time-varying bond risk premia entirely to changing prices of risk, while structural models with recursive preferences credit it completely to stochastic volatility. We reconcile these competing channels by introducing a novel form...

This paper breaks assets' betas with common factors into components attributable to news about future cash flows, real interest rates, and excess returns. To achieve this decomposition the paper uses a vector autoregressive time-series model and an approximate log-linear present value relation....

The equity premium consists of a term premium reflecting the longer maturity of equity relative to short-term bills, and a risk premium reflecting the stochastic nature of equity payoffs and the deterministic nature of payoffs on reckless bills. This paper analyzes term premia and the risk...

This study investigates whether market-wide liquidity is a state variable important for asset pricing. We find that expected stock returns are related cross-sectionally to the sensitivities of returns to fluctuations in aggregate liquidity. Our monthly liquidity measure, an average of...