Realistic models for financial asset prices used in portfolio choice, option pricing or risk management include both a continuous Brownian and a jump components. This paper studies our ability to distinguish one from the other. I find that, surprisingly, it is possible to perfectly disentangle...

Invariably across a cross-section of countries and time periods, wealth distributions are skewed to the right displaying thick upper tails, that is, large and slowly declining top wealth shares. In this survey we categorize the theoretical studies on the distribution of wealth in terms of the...

In this paper I analyze the relationships among investment, q, and cash flow in a tractable stochastic model in which marginal q and average q are identically equal. After analyzing the impact of changes in the distribution of the marginal operating profit of capital, I extend the model to...

Strategies selected by combining multiple signals suffer severe overfitting biases, because underlying signals are typically signed such that each predicts positive in-sample returns. "Highly significant" backtested performance is easy to generate by selecting stocks on the basis of combinations...

How are optimal taxes affected by the presence of superstar phenomena at the top of the earnings distribution? To answer this question, we extend the Mirrlees model to incorporate an assignment problem in the labor market that generates superstar effects. Perhaps surprisingly, rather than...

Asset prices contain information about the probability distribution of future states and the stochastic discounting of these states. Without additional assumptions, probabilities and stochastic discounting cannot be separately identified. Ross (2013) introduced a set of assumptions that restrict...

This paper is a study of the shape and structure of the distribution of prices at which an identical good is sold in a given market and time period. We find that the typical price distribution is symmetric and leptokurtic, with a standard deviation between 19% and 36%. Only 10% of the variance...

In affine asset pricing models, the innovation to the pricing kernel is a function of innovations to current and expected future values of an economic state variable, for example consumption growth, aggregate market returns, or short-term interest rates. The impulse response of this priced...

Climate policy is complicated by the considerable compounded uncertainties over the costs and benefits of abatement. We don't even know the probability distributions for future temperatures and impacts, making cost-benefit analysis based on expected values challenging to say the least. There are...