We develop a life-cycle consumption and portfolio choice model in which households have nonhomothetic utility over two types of goods, basic and luxury. We calibrate the model to match the cross-sectional and life-cycle variation in the basic expenditure share in the Consumer Expenditure Survey....

Aggregate stock prices, relative to virtually any indicator of fundamental value, soared to unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Even today, after the market declines since 2000, they remain well above historical norms. Why? We consider one particular explanation: a fall in macroeconomic risk, or...

Are excess returns predictable and if so, what does this mean for investors? Previous literature has tended toward two polar viewpoints: that predictability is useful only if the statistical evidence for it is incontrovertible, or that predictability should affect portfolio choice, even if the...

This paper proposes a dynamic risk-based model that captures the high expected returns on value stocks relative to growth stocks, and the failure of the capital asset pricing model to explain these expected returns. To model the difference between value and growth stocks, we introduce a...

This paper proposes a consumption-based model that can account for many features of the nominal term structure of interest rates. The driving force behind the model is a time-varying price of risk generated by external habit. Nominal bonds depend on past consumption growth through habit and on...

We consider measures of stock-picking skill of mutual fund managers based on the earnings announcement returns of the stocks that they hold and trade. Relative to standard approaches, this approach focuses on an especially informative subset of the returns data, potentially increasing power to...

Conditional factor models allow both risk loadings and performance over a period to be a function of information available at the start of the period. Much of the literature to date has allowed risk loadings to be time-varying while imposing the assumption that conditional performance is...

We consider the consumption and portfolio choice problem of a long-run investor when the term structure is affine and when the investor has access to nominal bonds and a stock portfolio. In the presence of unhedgeable inflation risk, there exist multiple pricing kernels that produce the same...

This paper proposes a Bayesian method of performance evaluation for investment managers. We begin with a flexible set of prior beliefs that can be elicited without any reference to probability distributions or their parameters. We then combine these prior beliefs with a general multi-factor...

Aggregate stock prices, relative to virtually any indicator of fundamental value, soared to unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Even today, after the market declines since 2000, they remain well above historical norms. Why? We consider one particular explanation: a fall in macroeconomic risk, or...