We review the literature on return and cash flow growth predictability form the perspective of the present-value identity. We focus predominantly on recent work. Our emphasis is on U.S. aggregate stock return predictability, but we also discuss evidence from other asset classes and countries

Value stocks have higher exposure to innovations in the nominal bond risk premium, which measures the markets' perception of cyclical variation in future output growth, than growth stocks. The ICAPM then predicts a value risk premium provided that good news about future output lowers the...

The fraction of newly-originated mortgages that are of the adjustable-rate (ARM) versus the fixed-rate (FRM) type exhibits a surprising amount of time variation. A simple utility framework of mortgage choice points to the bond risk premium as theoretical determinant: when the bond risk premium...

This paper studies the role of time-varying risk premia as a channel for generating and propagating fluctuations in housing markets, aggregate quantities, and consumption and wealth heterogeneity. We study a two-sector general equilibrium model of housing and non-housing production where...

We summarize and extend the new literature on the term structure of equity. Short-term equity claims, or dividend strips, have on average significantly higher returns than the aggregate stock market. The returns on short-term dividend claims are risky as measured by volatility, but safe as...

Life insurers use reinsurance to move liabilities from regulated and rated companies that sell policies to shadow reinsurers, which are less regulated and unrated off-balance-sheet entities within the same insurance group. U.S. life insurance and annuity liabilities ceded to shadow reinsurers...

A security's expected return can be decomposed into its "carry" and its expected price appreciation, where carry can be measured in advance without an asset pricing model. We find that carry predicts returns both in the cross section and time series for a variety of different asset classes that...

During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as -19 percent for annuities and -57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market frictions,...

We recover prices of dividend strips on the aggregate stock market using data from derivatives markets. The price of a k-year dividend strip is the present value of the dividend paid in k years. The value of the stock market is the sum of all dividend strip prices across maturities. We study the...

We propose a latent variables approach within a present-value model to estimate the expected returns and expected dividend growth rates of the aggregate stock market. This approach aggregates information contained in the history of price-dividend ratios and dividend growth rates to predict...