The poor performance of consumption-based asset pricing models relative to traditional portfolio-based asset pricing models is one of the great disappointments of the empirical asset pricing literature. We show that the external habit-formation model economy of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) can...

I show that a determinate, finite price level can be achieved in an economy with no monetary frictions, and no commodity standard or other explicit redemption commitment. I make one small modification to a standard cash in advance model: I reopen the security market at the end of the day. With...

What are the shocks that drive economic fluctuations? I examine technology and money shocks in some detail, and briefly review the evidence on oil price and credit shocks. I conclude that none of these popular candidates accounts for the bulk of economic fluctuations. I then examine whether...

This paper measures the mean, standard deviation, alpha and beta of venture capital investments, using a maximum likelihood estimate that corrects for selection bias. Since firms go public when they have achieved a good return, estimates that do not correct for selection bias are optimistic. The...

This essay examines what volatility tests tell us about the data and what implications we should derive from them. It argues that volatility tests do not tell us that "prices are too volatile", implying that "markets are inefficient", but rather that "(discounted) returns are forecastable",...

Asset returns, it turns out, do not follow the Capital Asset Pricing Model, and are somewhat predictable over time. I survey and interpret the large body of recent work that adapts traditional portfolio theory to answer, what should an investor do about these new facts in finance? I survey the...

Will the stock market provide high returns in the future as it has in the past? The average US stock return in the postwar period has been about 8% above treasury bill rates. But that average is poorly measured: The standard confidence interval extends from 3% to 13%. Furthermore, expected...

This paper exploits producer's first order conditions to link asset prices to data on investment, output, etc. through marginal rates of transformation, just as consumer's first order conditions are commonly used to link asset prices to consumption data or proxies through marginal rates of...

We measure monetary policy shocks as changes in the Fed funds target rate that surprise bond markets in daily data. These shock series avoid the omitted variable, time-varying parameter, and orthogonalization problem of monthly VARs, and do not impose the expectations hypothesis. We find...

This paper presents calculations of the utility cost to consumers of following alternative decision rules in the environments specified by tests of the intertemporal allocation of consumption on aggregate data. The alternatives include excess and inadequate sensitivity to income and interest...