The strongest predictor of changes in the Fed Funds rate in the period 1982–2008 was the layoff rate. That fact is puzzling from the perspective of representative-agent models of the economy, which imply that the welfare gains of stabilizing employment fluctuations are small. This paper...

Changes in credit supply induce large and frequent variations in households' access to unsecured debt. They generate a novel financial precautionary motive, which compounds the classical motive associated with idiosyncratic income risk, as borrowers accumulate risk-free bonds to hedge against...

We analyze the term structure of real interest rates in a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets and borrowing constraints. Agents are subject to both aggregate and idiosyncratic income shocks, which latter may force them into early portfolio liquidation in a bad aggregate state. We...

This paper studies how foreign investors' concerns about model misspecification affect sovereign bond spreads. We develop a general equilibrium model of sovereign debt with endogenous default wherein investors fear that the probability model of the underlying state of the borrowing economy is...

We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk. The cross-country high-minuslow (HML) conditional skewness of the unemployment gap - our measure of global macroeconomic uncertainty - is a factor that...

We provide a microeconomic analysis of the incentive and welfare effects of idiosyncratic return risk. While most of the existing literature has focused on risky returns as an aggregate shock, we allow for correlation between returns and the agent's non-financial endowment. Using a simple...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a promising approach to resolve prominent asset pricing puzzles. The simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, but caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a twostep...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a promising approach to resolve prominent asset pricing puzzles. The simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, but caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a twostep...