This paper studies the ability of long-run risk models to explain out-of-sample asset returns during 1931-2009. The long-run risk models perform relatively well on the momentum effect. A cointegrated version of the model outperforms the classical, stationary version. Both the long-run and the...

Three shocks, distinguished by whether their effects are permanent or transitory, are identified to characterize the post-war dynamics of aggregate consumer spending, labor earnings, and household wealth. The first shock accounts for virtually all of the variation in consumption; we argue that...

Changes in nominal interest rates must be due to either movements in real interest rates, expected inflation, or the inflation risk premium. We develop a term structure model with regime switches, time-varying prices of risk, and inflation to identify these components of the nominal yield curve....

This paper extends the class of stochastic volatility diffusions for asset returns to encompass Poisson jumps of time-varying intensity. We find that any reasonably descriptive continuous-time model for equity-index returns must allow for discrete jumps as well as stochastic volatility with a...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

This paper studies the connection between the stock market and the unemployment rate. I establish three facts. First, the log of the real value of the S&P 500 and the log of a logistic transformation of the unemployment rate are non-stationary cointegrated series. Second, the stock market...

Forecasts for the two or three years after mid-2014 have converged on growth rates of real GDP in the range of 3.0 to 3.5 percent, a major stepwise increase from realized growth of 2.1 percent between mid-2009 and mid-2014. However, these forecasts are based on the demand for goods and services....

A central challenge in the measurement of entrepreneurship is accounting for the wide variation in entrepreneurial quality across firms. This paper develops a new approach for estimating entrepreneurial quality by linking the probability of a growth outcome (e.g., achieving an IPO or a...

We use data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to compare point forecasts of GDP growth and inflation with the subjective probability distributions held by forecasters. We find that SPF forecasters summarize their underlying distributions in different ways and that their summaries tend...