This paper documents that daily stock returns of both firms and industries are more dispersed when the overall stock market rises than when it falls. This positive relation is conceptually distinct from - and appears unrelated to - asymmetric return correlations. I argue that the source of the...

I find that the standard class of affine models produces poor forecasts of future changes in Treasury yields. Better forecasts are generated by assuming that yields follow random walks. The failure of these models is driven by one of their key features: the compensation that investors receive...

This paper documents that daily stock returns of both firms and industries are more dispersed when the overall stock market rises than when it falls. This positive relation is conceptually distinct from - and appears unrelated to - asymmetric return correlations. I argue that the source of the...

I find that the standard class of affine models produces poor forecasts of future changes in Treasury yields. Better forecasts are generated by assuming that yields follow random walks. The failure of these models is driven by one of their key features: the compensation that investors receive...

Covariance matrix forecasts of financial asset returns are an important component of current practice in financial risk management. A wide variety of models, ranging from matrices of simple summary measures to covariance matrices implied from option prices, are available for generating such...

This paper extends the work of Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) by showing how to decompose approximation errors in stochastic discount factor models by frequency. This decomposition is applied to a number of prominent consumption-based discount factor models top investigate how well they fit at...

Central banks pay close attention to inflation expectations. In standard models, however, inflation expectations are tied down by the assumption of rational expectations and should be of little independent interest to policy makers. In this paper, we relax the assumption of rational expectations...

This paper examines a recent shift in the dynamics of the term structure and interest rate risk. We first use standard yield-spread regressions to document such a shift in the U.S. in the mid-1980s. Over the pre- and post-shift subsamples, we then estimate dynamic, affine, no-arbitrage models,...

The simplest tests of capital market efficiency are tests of the fair game model: conditional expected returns less the interest rate are equal to zero. The fair game model is thought to obtain only when markets are perfectly liquid. We show that this conjecture is false. In a model of the...

The term premium on nominal long-term bonds in the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to empirical measures obtained from the data--an example of the ''bond premium puzzle.'' However, in models of endowment...