I demonstrate that much of the time series variation in the credit spread on high yield bonds is attributable to changes in the “credit risk premium” rather than changes in expected default losses. The credit risk premium is the expected excess return investors earn from bearing default risk...

Two broad classes of consumption dynamics - long-run risks and rare disasters - have proven successful in explaining the equity premium puzzle when used in conjunction with recursive preference. We show that bounds a-la Gallant, Hansen and Tauchen (1990) that restrict the volatility of the...

We explore the relationship between sticky wages and risk. Like operating leverage, sticky wages are a source of risk for the firm. Firms, industries, regions, or times with especially high or rigid wages are especially risky. If wages are sticky, then wage growth should negatively forecast...

Optimal investment of firms implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity (two major components of the marginal benefit of...

This study applies a model averaging approach to conditionally forecast housing investment in the largest euro area countries and the euro area. To account for substantial modelling uncertainty, it estimates many vector error correction models (VECMs) using a wide set of short and long-run...

In the framework of a standard overlapping generations model, it is shown that active inflation forecast targeting reinforces mechanisms that lead to indeterminacy of the monetary steady state and to countercyclical behavior of young-age consumption. The inflation forecast targeting rule which...

Enrollment rates to higher education reveal quite large variation over time which cannot be explained by productivity shocks alone. We develop a human capital investment model in an overlapping generations framework that features endogenous fluctuations in the demand for education. Agents are...