We examine how to quantitatively reconcile the high volatility of market valuations of U.S. corporations with the relative stability of macroeconomic quantities since 1929. Macroeconomic and financial variables are measured in a consistent fashion using the Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts...

"Are deflation and depression empirically linked? No, concludes a broad historical study of inflation and real output growth rates. Deflation and depression do seem to have been linked during the 1930s. But in the rest of the data for 17 countries and more than 100 years, there is virtually no...

We measure the distribution of firms' financial soundness over most of the last century for a broad cross section of firms. We highlight three main findings for this key aggregate state variable. First, the three worst recessions between 1926 and 2012 coincided with sharp deteriorations in the...

In this paper, we measure the potential welfare gains from counter-cyclical policy in an economy with incomplete markets. In the course of conducting this measurement, we focus on two questions as central to the determination of those potential gains: (1) what is the likely effect of...

We present a pricing kernel that summarizes well the main features of the dynamics of interest rates and risk in postwar U.S. data and use it to uncover how the pricing kernel has moved with the short rate in this data. Our findings imply that standard monetary models miss an essential link...