We examine the evidence on excess stock return predictability in a Bayesian setting in which the investor faces uncertainty about both the existence and strength of predictability. When we apply our methods to the dividend-price ratio, we find that even investors who are quite skeptical about...

Large crises tend to follow rapid credit expansions. Causality, however, is far from obvious. We show how this pattern arises naturally when financial intermediaries optimally exploit economic rents that drive their franchise value. As this franchise value fluctuates over the business cycle, so...

"This review article describes recent literature on asset allocation, covering both static and dynamic models. The article focuses on the bond--stock decision and on the implications of return predictability. In the static setting, investors are assumed to be Bayesian, and the role of various...