We discuss the impact of different formulations of asset pricing models on the outcome of specification tests that are performed using excess returns. It is generally believed that when only excess returns are used for testing asset pricing models, the mean of the stochastic discount factor...

While the predictability of excess stock returns is detected by traditional predictive regressions as statistically small, the direction-of-change and volatility of returns exhibit a substantially larger degree of dependence over time. We capitalize on this observation and decompose the returns...

The low-frequency movements of many economic variables play a prominent role in policy analysis and decision-making. We develop a robust estimation approach for these slow-moving trend processes, which is guided by a judicious choice of priors and is characterized by sparsity. We present some...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...