This paper documents three empirical facts. First, the volatility of consumption growth relative to income growth rose from 1947-1960 and then fell dramatically by 50 percent from the 1960s to the 1990s. Second, the correlation between consumption growth and personal income growth fell by about...

I consider a consumption based asset pricing model where the consumer does not know if shocks to dividends are stationary (temporary) or non-stationary (permanent). The agent uses a Bayesian learning algorithm with a bias towards recent observations to assign probability to each process. While...