We study the inflation uncertainty reported by individual forecasters in the Survey of Professional Forecasters 1969-2001. Three popular measures of uncertainty built from survey data are analyzed in the context of models for forecasting and asset pricing, and improved estimation methods are...

A simple consumption-based two-period model is used to study the (theoretical) effects of disagreement on asset prices. Analytical and numerical results show that individual uncertainty has a much larger effect on risk premia than disagreement if (i) the risk aversion is reasonably high and (ii)...

The forecasting performance of the Livingston survey and traditional prediction models of stock prices is analysed. The survey forecasts look similar to those from a quot;too largequot; prediction model: poor out-of-sample performance and too sensitive to recent and irrelevant information

The effect of monetary policy on financial risk premia is analysed in a simple general equilibrium model with sticky wages and an optimising central bank. Analytical results show that equity risk premia and term premia are higher under inflation targeting than under output targeting, and that...

Survey and option data are used to take a fresh look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data suggests that investors tend to overestimate the volatility of equity...

This paper studies if the consumption-based asset pricing model can explain the cross-section of expected returns. The CRRA model and several refinements (habit persistence and idiosyncratic shocks) all imply that the conditional expected return is linearly increasing in the asset's conditional...

The British pound left the ERM on 16 September 1992 after a period of turbulence. UK monetary policy soon shifted to lower short interest rates, and an inflation target was announced. This paper uses daily option prices to estimate how the market's probability distribution of the future...

We first discuss performance evaluation using stochastic discount factors and relate it to traditional mean-variance analysis. We then use Monte Carlo experiments to examine the properties of various general method of moment (GMM) estimators. The test statistics are fairly well behaved although...

We summarize some methods useful in formulating and solving Hansen-Sargent robust control problems, and suggest extensions to discretionary and simple rule policies. Matlab and Gauss software is provided. Applications to the term structure of interest rates and to the time inconsistency of...

Recent research suggests that commonly estimated dynamic Taylor rules augmented with a lagged interest rate imply too much predictability of interest rate changes compared with yield curve evidence. We show that this is not sufficient proof against the Taylor rule: the result could be driven by...